An Infrastructure for the Design and Development of Open Interaction Systems

We propose an infrastructure for the design and development of Open Interaction Systems (OISs), based on solutions from the areas of Service Oriented Architecture, Semantic Technologies and Normative Multiagent Systems, in particular the OCeAN metamodel of Artificial Institution. OISs are open to diverse types of participants (i.e., software agents), and enable them to interact with each other to achieve their objectives. To do so the participants are allowed to interact in compliance with previously agreed-upon regulations provided by the system and on the basis of the semantics of the communicative acts performed, both of which are enforced by the system. The infrastructure we propose involves four layers: (i) the Messaging Layer, which enables observable ACL message exchanges between heterogeneous participants while respecting ownership boundaries; (ii) the Core Service Layer, which enables the participants with performing observable non-communicative actions relevant to the ongoing application (iii) the Bridging Layer, in charge of interpreting the participants’ actions in a form suitable for regulation; and (iv) the Regulation Layer, which holds the regulations and enforces them with respect to the participants’ activities.