Communicating Open Systems (Extended Abstract) / 3146
Mark d'Inverno, Michael Luck, Pablo Noriega, Juan A. Rodriguez-Aguilar, Carles Sierra

Just as conventional institutions are organisational structures for coordinating the activities of multiple interacting individuals, electronic institutions providea computational analogue for coordinating theactivities of multiple interacting software agents.In this paper, we argue that open multi-agent systemscan be effectively designed and implementedas electronic institutions, for which we provide acomprehensive computational model. More specifically, the paper provides an operational semanticsfor electronic institutions, specifying the essential data structures, the state representation and the key operations necessary to implement them.