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Analysis of the Use of Events and States as Brute Facts in Modelling of Institutional Facts

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Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems IX (COIN 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8386))

Abstract

Although the institutional dimension of a multi-agent system can be affected directly by the actions of the agents, it can be also affected by facts originating in the environment or even in the institution. In previous work, we proposed a model, language and its interpreter to specify the institutional consequences of both events and states from environment and institution. This paper analyses this twofold approach, looking for a better understanding about the performance of the interpreter and about the design differences between using event and states. The contributions of this work are (i) the evaluation of some aspects of a proposed and implemented language, (ii) guidelines to choose between events and states to model count-as rules, and (iii) an initial benchmark to evaluate further improvements to the interpreter and the performance of similar proposals.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Besides agents and institution, this work considers the environment as a first-class abstraction, composed by non autonomous elements that encapsulate functionalities and services to support agent activities [16].

  2. 2.

    About the unobservable portion, its existence is assumed but is not of our concern.

  3. 3.

    Although some happenings are effects of agents’ actions, our focus is just on the effect regardless the agents’ action.

  4. 4.

    In this paper we present the most relevant transition rules for the language semantics. The complete operational semantics is presented in [7].

  5. 5.

    Although the complete execution time is influenced by factors other than the CE (e.g. the time taken by an agent acting in the environment, the time that the environmental artifact takes to process an action, etc.), the comparisons are made considering these factors as equals, changing only the factors under evaluation.

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Acknowledgments

Maiquel de Brito is financed by CAPES. Jomi Fred Hübner and Rafael H. Bordini acknowledge the partial financial support for this work given by CNPq (grant numbers 306301/2012-1 and 308095/2012-0).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil

    Maiquel de Brito & Jomi Fred Hübner

  2. FACIN–PUCRS, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil

    Rafael H. Bordini

Authors
  1. Maiquel de Brito
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  2. Jomi Fred Hübner
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  3. Rafael H. Bordini
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maiquel de Brito .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom

    Tina Balke

  2. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Frank Dignum

  3. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    M. Birna van Riemsdijk

  4. Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom

    Amit K. Chopra

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de Brito, M., Hübner, J.F., Bordini, R.H. (2014). Analysis of the Use of Events and States as Brute Facts in Modelling of Institutional Facts. In: Balke, T., Dignum, F., van Riemsdijk, M., Chopra, A. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems IX. COIN 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8386. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07314-9_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07314-9_10

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