In most of the existing approaches to the design of multiagent systems, there is no clear way in which to relate organisational and normative structures to the model of the environment where they are to be situated and operate. Our work addresses this problem by putting together, in a practical approach to developing multi-agent systems (and social simulations in particular), a high-level environment modelling language that incorporates aspects of agents, organisations, and normative structures. The paper explains in some detail how the ideas of normative objects and normative places, put together as a distributed normative infrastructure, allow the definition of certain kinds of situated multi-agent organisations, in particular organisations for multi-agent systems that operate within concrete environments. Normative objects are environment objects used to explicitly convey normative content that regulate the behaviour of agents within the place where such objects can be perceived by agents. The paper briefly introduces such concepts, showing how they were integrated into the MAS-SOC multi-agent systems platform for social simulation, and hints on new problems of (situated) organisational and normative structures that were brought forward by the work presented here.
Organisational structures for multi-agent systems are usually defined independently of any spatial or temporal structure. Therefore, when the multiagent system is situated in a spatial environment, there is usually a conceptual gap between the definition of the system's organisational structures and the definition of the environment. In this paper, we focus on a mechanism for the spatial distribution of an organization's normative information. Spatially distributing the normative information over the environment is a natural way to simplify the definition of organisational structures and the development of large-scale multi-agent systems. By distributing the normative information in different spatial locations, we allow agents to directly access the relevant information needed in each environmental context. We extend our previous work on a language for modelling multi-agent environments in order to allow for the definition of spatially distributed norms in the form of normative objects.
Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems (COIN), held with ECAI,
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