A Contract Model for Electronic Institutions

Abstract

Electronic institutions are software frameworks integrating normative environments where agents interact to create mutual commitments. Contracts are formalizations of business commitments among a group of agents, and comprise a set of applicable norms. An electronic institution acts as a trusted third-party that monitors contract compliance, by integrating in its normative environment the contractual norms, which are applicable to the set of contractual partners. In this paper we present and explore a contract model that facilitates contract establishment by taking advantage of an institutional normative background. Furthermore, the model is flexible enough to enable the expansion of the underlying normative framework, making it applicable to a wide range of contracting situations.

Analysing the Suitability of Multiagent Methodologies for e-Health Systems

“…Many of them also allow the specification of organisational systems. These agent methodologies are able to describe different normative contexts by means of specifying norms whose scope is limited to one specific organisation of the system [43,15,7].…”

Evaluating how agent methodologies support the specification of the normative environment through the development process

“…These agent methodologies are able to describe different normative environments by means of specifying norms whose scope is limited to one particular organisation of the system [59,27,16].…”

“…Over the last few years, the integration of electronic contracts in multiagent systems (MAS) has become increasingly more important to system architectures for agent behaviour regulation [51,16,38].…”

A Context-Based Institutional Normative Environment

“…While contextual info is confined to background information that is part of the context definition, contextual institutional reality elements represent occurrences taking place after the context's creation, during its lifetime. We consider institutional facts as agent-originated, since they are obtained as a consequence of some agent action [4]. The remaining elements are environment events, asserted in the process of norm application and monitoring.…”

“…In fact, one of the core services that we consider is the provision of a supportive normative framework in the institutional environment, which agents can exploit in order to establish their contracts in a more straightforward fashion. Contracts [4] can be underspecified, relying on a structured normative framework that fills in any omissions.…”