Page 282 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Enabling Open Agent Institutions 265

ture projection for buyer agents in FM96.5, the computational counterpart of
the fish market. If some buyer requests his interagent for leaving the institu-
tion after making some acquisitions in the auction scene, his interagent will
refuse the request because the agent has pending obligations: the payment of
the acquired goods, as stated by the institutional normative rules.

not(commit(x:b,y:bac,pay(?g,?price,?card)))
Auction

buyers buyers
registry S'
admission settlements

Figure 32.2. Performative structure projection for buying agents.

In general, based on external agents’ actions, the facts deriving from their
participation in scenes and the institutional normative rules, interagents are
capable of determining which obligations and prohibitions to trigger.
Finally, interagents handle transparently to external agents their incorpora-
tion into ongoing scenes, their exit from ongoing scenes, their migration be-
tween scenes, and the joint creation of new scenes with other agents by means
of their coordinated activity with institutional agents, as fully accounted by the
computational model detailed in [8].
5. Conclusions

Organisational and social concepts can enormously help reduce the com-
plexity inherent to the deployment of open multi-agent systems. In particular,
institutions are tremendously valuable to help solve the many inherent issues
to open multi-agent systems. The conception of open multi-agent systems as
electronic institutions lead us to a general computational model based on two
types of agents: institutional agents and interagents. Although our computa-
tional model proved to be valuable in the development of the computational
counterpart of the fish market, we claim that such a computational model is
general enough to found the development of other agent institutions.