Q2. What is the use of the graph editor pane?
The graph editor pane is used for the creation and modification of the graph topology while the textual information associated to the graph is introduced and modified using the inspect pane.
Q3. What are the main motivations for the development of a monitoring tool?
trust and accountability are themain motivations for the development of a monitoring tool that registers all interactions admitted in a given enactment of an electronic institution (Noriega, 1997; Rodŕıguez-Aguilar, 2001).
Q4. What is the advantage of ISLANDER in the design of coordination mechanisms?
The inherent flexibility of ISLANDER in the design of coordination mechanisms favours an easy, ready maintenance: when changes are accommodated in a new specification, they are ready to be run by AMELI, and agents are ready to plug and play.
Q5. What is the role of the agent designer in an EI?
Since an EI delegates their services and duties to the agents playing the internal roles (staff agents), their complete development is needed before the EI can be deployed and opened to external agents playing external roles.
Q6. What are some of the MAS methodologies that are not based on a strong agent-?
There are some agent infrastructures such as DARPA COABS coabs (2004) and FIPA compliant platforms such as JADE (Bellifemine et al., 2001) that deal with many issues that are essential for open agent interactions –communication, identification, synchronization, matchmaking– that can be used as building blocks for the development of open multi-agent systems.
Q7. What are some fishmarkets doing to reduce their selling methods?
Some fishmarkets are adapting their selling methods to new technologies and most auctions are nowadays somewhat automated, although the presence of human buyers in the auction houses is still necessary.
Q8. Why did the authors introduce an integrated development environment for the engineering of multiagent systems as electronic institutions?
Due to the complexity of EIs, the authors early identified the need of software tools that support EIs design and development as one of the main issues in their research (Noriega, 1997; Rodŕıguez-Aguilar, 2001; Esteva, 2003), and in this paper the authors have introduced an integrated development environment for the engineering of multiagent systems as electronic institutions as the result of their group’s effort over these years.
Q9. How is the price of fish lowered?
Fish is presented in collections of boxes, called lots, and put up for auction following a Dutch-like protocol: price is progressively and quickly lowered —4 quotes per second— until a buyer submits a bid or the price descent reaches the reservation price.
Q10. What does the architecture consider as communication neutral?
participating agents regard their architecture as communication neutral since they are not affected by changes in the communication layer.
Q11. Why are there still challenges of building open systems?
the challenges of building open systems are still considerable, not only because of the inherent complexity involved in having adequate interoperation of heterogeneous, independent, distributed, autonomous components, but also because of the significant difficulties of deployment and adoption of the amalgamated systems.
Q12. What is the role of the social layer in the EI?
unlike traditional approaches that allow agents to openly interact with their peers via a communication layer, their computational realisation of an EI must be regarded as a social middleware that sits between the participating agents and the chosen communication layer validating (filtering in) or rejecting (filtering out) their actions as shown in figure 4 4 .
Q13. What is the purpose of the tool?
The tool facilitates the work of the institution designer combining graphical and textual specifications of EI components, based on the formalisation of EIs presented in (Esteva, 2003) and outlined in section 2.