Operationalisation of Norms for Electronic Institutions

Agent-mediated electronic institutions belong to a new and promising field where interactions among 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. 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 for the use of implementation.