Requesting agent participation in electronic institutions

The Electronic Institutions (EIs) framework is designed for regulating interactions among heterogeneous agents in open systems [1]. In EIs, agent interactions are speech acts whose exchange is organized as conversation protocols called scenes. Agents can participate simultaneously in multiple scenes playing a single role in each one of them. However, at some point, the execution of a given scene may require the presence of an agent playing a particular role. When such an agent is missing, a deadlock may ensue unless the institution or the agents themselves can invoke the participation of an agent to play the missing role. Such functionality is not provided in the current EI framework. We propose an extension of the framework that addresses that problem in a generic way: the provision of an institutional agent in charge of instantiating new agents and dispatching them to scenes through a participation request protocol. In this paper we make the proposal precise and illustrate it with a use case.