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Environmental Consequences of Institutional Facts in Artificial Institutions

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Book cover Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XIV (COINE 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13239))

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Abstract

In multi-agent systems, the agents may have goals that depend on the common interpretation of actions and other agents acting in the system. These goals are thus social goals. Artificial institutions are used to provide such a social interpretation by assigning statuses to the concrete elements that compose the system. These statuses are supposed to enable the assignee element to perform functions that are not exclusively inherent to their design features. However, the consequences in the environment of the enabled functions are not explicit in the existing models of artificial institutions. As a consequence, (i) agents may have difficulties reasoning about the achievement of their social goals and (ii) these institutions are not well instrumented to receive incoming agents in the case of open systems. Considering these problems, this paper proposes the addition of purposes in artificial institution models to express the consequences in the environment of the constitution of status-functions helping the agents to reason about the fulfillment of their social goals. We evaluate the proposal in some scenarios, showing how the agents can use purposes to reason about the satisfaction of their social goals in institutional contexts and how the institution can be flexible enough to support new agents operating in the system.

This study was supported by the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio Grande do Sul (IFRS).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Compatibility in this work refers to the situation in which the vocabulary used in the specification of the agents works appropriately with the vocabulary of the institutional specification. Compatibility can occur in several ways, including (i) if the vocabulary present in the agent’s specification is identical to the institutional vocabulary or (ii) if the programmer encodes compatibility with the institutional specification within the agent.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/smart-pucrs/MasOntology.

  3. 3.

    An initial implementation of this platform can be found in https://github.com/rafhaelrc/psf_model.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio Grande do Sul (IFRS), Campus Vacaria, Vacaria, Brazil

    Rafhael R. Cunha

  2. Automation and Systems Department, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil

    Rafhael R. Cunha & Jomi F. Hübner

  3. Control, Automation, and Computation Engineering Department, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Blumenau, Brazil

    Maiquel de Brito

Authors
  1. Rafhael R. Cunha
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  2. Jomi F. Hübner
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  3. Maiquel de Brito
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Correspondence to Rafhael R. Cunha .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Andreas Theodorou

  2. Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Juan Carlos Nieves

  3. University of Bath, Claverton Down, UK

    Marina De Vos

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Cunha, R.R., Hübner, J.F., de Brito, M. (2022). Environmental Consequences of Institutional Facts in Artificial Institutions. In: Theodorou, A., Nieves, J.C., De Vos, M. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XIV. COINE 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13239. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16617-4_4

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