Università della Svizzera italiana

Artificial institutions : a model of institutional reality for open multiagent systems

Fornara, Nicoletta ; Viganò, Francesco ; Verdicchio, Mario ; Colombetti, Marco

In: Artificial Intelligence and Law, 2008, vol. 16, no. 1, p. 89-105

Software agents' ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents' interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Agent communication and institutional reality

Fornara, Nicoletta ; Viganò, Francesco ; Colombetti, Marco

In this paper we propose to regard an Agent Communication Language (ACL) as a set of conventions to act on a fragment of institutional reality, defined in the context of an artificial institution. Within such an approach, we first reformulate a previously proposed commitment-based semantics for ACLs. In particular we show that all commonly used types of communicative acts can be defined in terms...

Università della Svizzera italiana

An operational approach to norms in artificial institutions

Viganò, Francesco ; Fornara, Nicoletta ; Colombetti, Marco

The notion of artificial institution is crucial for the specification of open and dynamic interaction frameworks where heterogeneous and autonomous agents can interact to face problems in various fields, like for instance electronic commerce, business-to-business (B2B) applications, and personal assistant applications. In our view the specification of artificial institutions requires a clear...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Artificial institutions : a model of institutional reality for open multiagent systems

Fornara, Nicoletta ; Viganò, Francesco ; Verdicchio, Mario ; Colombetti, Marco

Software agents’ ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents’ interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open...