The social and organisational aspects of agency have led to a good amount of theoretical
work in terms of formal models and theories. However, the conception and engineering of …

Abstract Systems of autonomous and self-interested agents interacting to achieve individual
and collective goals may exhibit undesirable or unexpected behaviour if left unconstrained …

Normative multi-agent systems offer the ability to integrate social and individual factors to
provide increased levels of fidelity with respect to modelling social phenomena, such as …

This chapter addresses the problem of building normative multiagent systems in terms of
regulatory mechanisms. It describes a static conceptual model through which one can …

Norms explicitly represent prohibitions, permissions and obligations associated with
software agents, changing as agents act and interact in pursuit of their goals. Norms provide …

The social and organisational aspects of agency have become nowadays a major focus of
interest in the MAS community, and a good amount of theoretical work is available, in terms …

Distributed systems comprised of autonomous self-interested entities require some sort of
control mechanism to ensure the predictability of the interactions that drive them. This is …

The contract project was a European Commission project whose aim was to develop
frameworks, components and tools to model, build, verify and monitor distributed electronic …

The notion of electronic institution draws inspiration from traditional institutions. Both can be
seen as “coordination artefacts that serve as an interface between the internal decision …

Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) are a recent approach to analysing,
designing and implementing complex software systems. Using agents as a key abstraction …