Just as conventional institutions are organisational structures for coordinating the activities of multiple interacting individuals, electronic institutions provide a computational analogue for coordinating the activities of multiple interacting software agents. In this paper, we argue that open multi-agent systems can be effectively designed and implemented as electronic institutions, for which we provide a comprehensive computational model. More specifically, the paper provides an operational semantics for electronic institutions, specifying the essential data structures, the state representation and the key operations necessary to implement them.
["Mark d'Inverno", 'Michael Luck', 'Pablo Noriega', 'Juan A. Rodríguez-Aguilar', 'Carles Sierra']
Communicating open systems (extended abstract)