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International audience; The behaviour of autonomous agents may deviate from that deemed to be for the good of the societal systems of which they are a part. Norms have therefore been proposed as a means to regulate agent behaviours in open and dynamic systems, where these norms specify the obliged, permitted and prohibited behaviours of agents. Regulation can effectively be achieved through use of enforcement mechanisms that result in a net loss of utility for an agent in cases where the agent’s behaviour fails to comply with the norms. Recognition of compliance is thus crucial for achieving regulation. In this paper, we propose a general framework for observation of agents’ behaviour, and recognition of this behaviour as constituting, or counting as, compliance or violation. The framework deploys monitors that receive inputs from trusted observers, and processes these inputs together with transition network representations of individual norms. In this way, monitors determine the fulfillment or violation status of norms. The paper also describes a proof of concept implementation of the framework, and its deployment in electronic contracting environments.

International audience; 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 businesssystems based on electronic contracts. In this context, an electronic contract provides a specification of the expected behaviours of individual services, with the assumption that these services are often enacted by autonomous agents. Using the theoretical tools created by the project, in this paper we describe the complete life cycle of instantiating an electronic contracting system using the contract framework within the aerospace aftercare domain. Thus, we use a natural language description of parts of the types of contracts used in this domain to generate individual norms amenable to a computational representation, and how these norms are used to generate a concrete contract monitor. Moreover, we describe a concrete implementation of contract agentsin the AgentSpeak(L) language and how these agents interact within a concrete instantiation of contract.

This paper integrates the responses to a set of questions from a distinguished set of panelists involved in a discussion at the Agreement Technologies workshop in Cyprus in December 2009. The panel was concerned with the relationship between the research areas of semantics, norms, and organizations, and the ways in which each may contribute to the development of the others in support of next generation agreement technologies.

Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XXVII Incorporating Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems XVIII; International audience; Norms impose obligations, permissions and prohibitions on individual agents operating as part of an organisation. Typically, the purpose of such norms is to ensure that an organisation acts in some socially (or mutually) beneficial manner, possibly at the expense of individual agent utility. In this context, agents are normaware if they are able to reason about which norms are applicable to them, and to decide whether to comply with or ignore them. While much work has focused on the creation of norm-aware agents, much less has been concerned with aiding system designers in understanding the effects of norms on a system. The ability to understand such norm effects can aid the designer in avoiding incorrect norm specification, eliminating redundant norms and reducing normative conflict. In this paper, we address the problem of norm understanding by providing explanations as to why a norm is applicable, violated, or in some other state. We make use of conceptual graph based semantics to provide a graphical representation of the norms within a system. Given knowledge of the current and historical state of the system, such a representation allows for explanation of the state of norms, showing for example why they may have been activated or violated.

Electronic contracts mirror the paper versions exchanged between businesses today, and offer the possibility of dynamic, automatic creation and enforcement of restrictions and compulsions on service behaviour that are designed to ensure business objectives are met. Where there are many contracts within a particular application, it can be difficult to determine whether the system can reliably fulfil them all, yet computer-parsable electronic contracts may allow such verification to be automated. In this chapter, we describe a conceptual framework and architecture specification in which normative business contracts can be electronically represented, verified, established, renewed, and so on. In particular, we aim to allow systems containing multiple contracts to be checked for conflicts and violations of business objectives. We illustrate the framework and architecture with an aerospace aftermarket example.

1: Invited Talks.- The Immergence of Norms in Agent Worlds.- Thinking Integral: How to Build Complex Systems That Live with People and Exhibit Collective Intelligence.- 2: Self-organisation.- A Space-Based Generic Pattern for Self-Initiative Load Balancing Agents.- A Goal-Oriented Approach for Modelling Self-organising MAS.- Engineering Agent Organisations in a Business Environment.- Peer-to-Peer Overlay Network Based on Swarm Intelligence.- 3: Software-Engineering and Architectures.- Agent Architectures for Compliance.- Incorporating BDI Agents into Human-Agent Decision Making Research.- Programming Organization-Aware Agents.- Energy Trade-Offs in Resource-Constrained Multi-Agent Systems.- 4: Social Aspects of Agent Societies.- Engineering Social Reality with Inheritance Relations.- Determining the Trustworthiness of New Electronic Contracts.- Trust Based Evaluation of Wikipedia's Contributors.- Evolutionary Role Model for Multi-Agent Systems.- 5: Organisation and Autonomy.- Replication Based on Role Concept for Multi-Agent Systems.- Knowledge Management in Role Based Agents.- Balancing Organizational Regulation and Agent Autonomy: An MDE-Based Approach.- Cooperative Sign Language Tutoring: A Multiagent Approach.- Assistance Layer in a P2P Scenario.- Navigational Web-Interfaces from Formal Tropos Specification.- 6: Demonstrations.- ALIVE: A Framework for Flexible and Adaptive Service Coordination.- An Organisational Adaptation Simulator for P2P Networks.- PreSage-MS: Metric Spaces in PreSage.- Normative Multi-Agent Organizations.- Hybrid Teams in Virtual Environments: Samurai Joins the Training Team.- Joint Activity Testbed: Blocks World for Teams (BW4T).

International audience; The behaviours of autonomous agentsmay deviate fromthose deem-ed to be for the good of the societal systems of which they are apart. Norms have therefore been proposed as a means to regulateagent behaviours in open and dynamic systems, where these normsspecify the obliged, permitted and prohibited behaviours of agents.Regulation can effectively be achieved through use of enforcementmechanisms that result in a net loss of utility for an agent in caseswhere the agent’s behaviour fails to comply with the norms. Recog-nition of compliance is thus crucial for achieving regulation. In thispaper we propose a generic architecture for observation of agentbehaviours, and recognition of these behaviours as constituting,or counting as, compliance or violation. The architecture deploysmonitors that receive inputs from observers, and processes these in-puts together with transition network representations of individualnorms. In this way, monitors determine the fulfillment or violationstatus of norms. The paper also describes a proof of concept im-plementation and deployment of monitors in electronic contractingenvironments.

International audience; Most Multi-Agent System designers use several notions - like "agent", "artifact", "object", etc. - to classify the entities involved in simulations. These notions require different methodologies, data structures and algorithms. In this paper, we show that the representation of entities can be favorably unified. As a consequence, the design and implementation process are made easier, since the designer has no longer to assign a fixed type to each entity during model construction. The implementation handles entities through an unified data structure and algorithm, and is therefore lightweight and more maintainable. Such an unification is performed without efficiency loss in a concrete simulation methodology called IODA. According to common sense, we propose to call such an unified entity simply "agent" !

International audience