Page 280 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Enabling Open Agent Institutions 263

∗
buyer admitter = registry.((opening.(buyer admission) )||closing)
∗
auctioneer = registry.((opening.(request goods.(auction||credit line)) )
|| closing)
∗
∗
seller accountant = registry.(opening.(good adjudication ||seller settlements )
|| closing)
Table 32.1. Institutional agents’ responsibilities specification.

for the auctioneer are ranked as follows: (registry,High) (opening,High) (clos-
ing,High) (request goods,Medium) (credit line,Medium) (auction,Low);where
High, Medium and Low denote different priority degrees..
And yet there remains the matter of deciding how to behave within each
scene in which an institutional agent will get involved. When participating in
a scene, at some states an institutional agent will be expected to act by uttering
an illocution as a result of an inner decision-making process. For instance, an
auctioneer must know how to select the winner of a bidding round, a buyers’
admitter must decide whether to admit a buyer or not, and a sellers’ admitter
must know how to tag the incoming goods to be put at auction. These inner
activities yield illocutions to be uttered by the institutional agent. Since an in-
stitutional agent must know which method to fire at those scene states at which
it is expected to act, his behaviour specification is provided as a collection of
methods to be fired at particular states of the scene. For instance, Figure 32.1
contains a specification of an auction scene protocol (the graph nodes denote
scene states connected by arcs labeled by illocution schemes. Transitions occur
when illocutions uttered by agents match illocution schemes.). The auctioneer
is instructed to run the declareWinner method at ω 7 .
In [8] we propose a general model of institutional agent in order to ease
development. Thus, the very same institutional agent model (architecture) can
be employed to deploy several institutional agents playing different roles.
4.2 Interagents

Interagents [4] constitute the sole and exclusive means through which agents
interact with the rest of agents within the institution. They become the only
channel through which illocutions can pass between external agents and in-
stitutional agents. Notice that interagents are all owned by the institution but
used by external agents. The mediation of interagents is key in order to guar-
antee: the legal exchange of illocutions among agents within scenes; the sound
transition of external agents from activity to activity within the institution’s
performative structure; the enforcement of institutional rules; and the account-
ability of external agents’ interactions.