Normative Coordination In Multi-Agent System (MAS) Electronic Institutions

Human societies are composed of heterogeneous individuals in interests and reasoning patterns. This has often led to conflicts in the meanings of their interactions, increased uncertainty in the outcomes of their behavior and complexity in decision making. To mitigate these problems humans have established conventions which are general agreements on language, meaning and behavior. The guidelines establish society norms in human institutions. Humans are then bound to socially act and behave according to the norms. The norms structure organizations and enforce behavior and interactions.Norms are useful abstractions to facilitate coordination, cooperation in open, heterogeneous and dynamic systems. They provide guidelines within which organizational entities set their behavioral patterns within acceptable limits. Norms outline the obligations, prohibitions and permissions that apply in organizations. Organizations of Multi-Agent Systems are also referred to as electronic (MAS) institutions. We propose a model, or a framework, viz., normative structures, to regulate, organize, and control the behavior of autonomous agents taking part in simultaneous and possibly related activities, within a multi-agent system. Our framework demonstrates a norms transition from their representation, propagation, enforcement, violation detection to sanctions meting mechanisms. Normative Multi Agents Systems cannot be studied in a vacuum, as norms are behavioral guards in a society of things. The scenario in which we study norms is the e-Loan MarketPlace, a virtual or electronic organization. In open and heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems organizations, various agents have different goals that may be in contention. To achieve harmony in such systems, formal and widely agreed ways of coordinating the sequential actions of entities must be put in place. Normative structures offer a mechanism to achieve coordination before planning in Electronic organizations.Commercial Banks and other financial institutions have revolutionized the way business is done by going beyond their traditional brick and mortar to set-up markets in virtual electronic houses. The electronic institutions through Agent Technology provide a means to implement a virtual loan marketplace for loan shoppers to window-shop and strategically and methodically negotiate their self-interest loan terms. The loan shoppers have access to all the loan products and services of other Banks hence quickening product selection and decision making. Bank Agents are housed in separate containers, and operate under certain norms that govern the marketplace. The operation of each and every agent is kept track of against compliance to institutional and regulative norms. Norms are enforced to all participants and penalties meted to erring agents. The norms are advertised to agents and their compliance is monitored. This realizes the main objective of our research work to achieve and direct Multi Agent coordination via normative systems. The behavior of agents towards one another or towards the institution, is coordinated to be appropriate via a normative approach. Significant cognizance is that open multi-agent systems are populated by heterogeneous, self-interested agents, developed by different people, using different languages and architectures. Participants change over time and are unknown in advance. Monitoring and controls in El cannot be relaxed without institutional disorder. In the development of the eLoan MarketPlace normative application agent software engineering methodologies which in normative research are referred to as Organizational Oriented MAS (OOMAS) methodologies have been applied. We use the Gaia extension methodology that Jorge Gonzalez-Palacios and Michael Luck advocate for in their seminal paper. This methodology is appropriate due to its simplicity in executing the project as small and manageable increments.