Verifying Organizations Regulated by Institutions

Abstract

Institutions have been proposed to explicitly represent norms in open multi-agent systems, where agents may not follow them and which therefore require mechanisms to detect violations. In doing so, they increase the efficiency of electronic transactions carried out by agents, but raise the problem of ensuring that such institutions are not characterized by contradictory norms, and provide agents with all the needed powers to fulfill their objectives. In this chapter we present a framework to verify organizations regulated by institutions, which is characterized by a precise formalization of institutional concepts, a language to describe institutions, and a tool to model check them. Finally, to evaluate and exemplify our approach, we model and verify the Chaired Meeting Institution, showing that the verification of institutional rules constitutes a necessary step to define sound institutions.