Designing Institutional Multi-Agent Systems

The vision of agents working together on the Internet, in virtual organizations, is one that is increasingly common. However, one of the issues is the regulation of the participating agents and their behaviour. A substantial body of work exists that investigates agent societies and agent organizations, including work on electronic institutions, such as Islander and Ameli. However, although such work provides concrete tools for specifying and enacting institutions, there is a lack of clear documented guidance to designers who are using these tools. In this paper we describe a methodology for developing an institutional structure for multi agent systems. This methodology captures the knowledge and experience within the Islander group, and integrates it with the Prometheus methodology. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under grant LP0453486, in collaboration with Agent Oriented Software. We also thank the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse for use of their tourism content in our agents. Carles Sierra is being supported by the Spanish Web-I(2) project and the ARC Discovery Grant DP0557168.