Normative Run-Time Reasoning for Institutionally-Situated BDI Agents

Institutions offer the promise of a means to govern open systems, in particular open multi-agent systems. Research in logics, and subsequently tools, supports the specification, verification and enactment of institutions. Most effort to date has focussed on the design-time properties of institutions (either on the normative or the system level), such as whether a particular state of affairs is reachable or not from a given set of initial conditions. Such models are useful in forcing the designer to state their intentions precisely, and for testing (design) properties. However, we identify two problems in the direct utilization of event-based design-time models in the governance of live (running) systems: (i) over-specification of constraints on agent autonomy and (ii) generation of design-time model artefacts. In this paper we present a methodology to tackle these two problems and extract the run-time model from the design-time one. We demonstrate how to derive an event-based run-time model of institutions that can be incorporated into the reasoning processes of autonomous BDI agents to realize practical norm-governed multi-agent systems.