The Role of Institutions in Multiagent Systems

The development of open multiagent systems presupposes not only a standard Agent Communication Language and common conversation protocols, but also some kind of social framework within which agent interactions can be carried out. To account for such a social framework we propose a suitable construct, that we call an institution, imposing role-dependent authorizations and interaction rules on groups of agents. In particular, we introduce a Core Institution to set the conditions for the manipulation of social commitments, which we take as the fundamental notion for modeling communicative interactions in a multiagent system. Within the Core Institution we define a basic library of communicative acts. We then suggest that institutions can be employed to model conversational rules and special interaction frameworks, like those that are necessary to develop e-business applications.