Operationalisation of norms for usage in electronic institutions

Agent-mediated electronic institutions belong to a new and promising field where interactions between a group of agents are regulated by means of a set of explicit norms. Current implementations of such open-agent systems are, however, mostly using constraints on the behaviour of the agents, thereby severely limiting the autonomy of the agents. To increase the autonomy of agents and possibly boost the efficiency of the overall system, a more flexible norm enforcement is required. However, as norms make extensive use of vague and ambiguous concepts and lack operational meaning (not expressing how the norm should be enforced), translating norms for usage with such a flexible enforcement mechanism might be difficult. In this paper we propose an extension to electronic institutions to allow for a flexible enforcement of norms, and manners to help overcome the difficulties of translating abstract norms. Copyright 2006 ACM.