Multi-Agent
System based ELECTRONIC INSTITUTIONS
This research line is being developed at
NIAD&R
- Distributed Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Group (LIACC) by the
following researchers:
Other collaborators (scholarship holders): Bernd
Schneiders, Daniel Teixeira, Orlando Fernandes, Rui
Neves,
Filipe Silva, Sérgio
Moura, Pedro Brandão
This research line came out of previous
work both from Eugénio Oliveira and Ana Paula Rocha in the
framework of AGENTLink
European Network of Excellence and Ana Paula PhD Thesis on Virtual
Organizations under supervision of Prof. Eugénio Oliveira.
The research main force is now driven by the PhD Thesis
of Henrique Lopes Cardoso (under E. Oliveira supervision) and Joana
Urbano.
The Electronic Institution
Concept
Electronic Institutions are computational frameworks based on
organizational
concepts providing services and protocols for software agents to meet
in a way
that can be trusted, efficient and safe. Interaction and negotiation
protocols, rules and norms for regulating consortia formation and
subsequent
joint operation,
pro-active contract monitoring services and trust/reputation management
are among the features we include in a multi-agent Electronic
Institution.
Research Rationale
This research effort includes an ongoing development of an
Electronic Institution software platform that includes several services
which together compose a seamless integration of several agent-based
automated processes applied to B2B scenarios. The research embraces:
- Services for business agreements formation, such as information
searching, negotiation protocols, negotiation mediation, ontology
mapping, contract templates;
- A normative framework that governs the interaction of agents
forming contracts within the Electronic Institution;
- Services for norm monitoring and contract enforcement;
- Trust and reputation mechanisms that enrich agents' contracting
experiences.
The research conducted so far or in progress can be conceptually
subdivided as follows:
Mediated Negotiation Protocols for Virtual
Enterprise formation
(ForEV System)
|
Ontology Services
|
Normative Support, Contract Monitoring and
Enforcement
|
Trust and Reputation
|
ForEV encompasses algorithms for adaptive
negotiating agents willing to cooperate in a specific Virtual
Enterprise. Other than adaptive, and based on qualitative feedback,
those multi-criteria negotiating protocols also encompass facilities
for mutual dependencies resolution and are, therefore, appropriate for
B2B complex negotiations.
|
An intrinsic problem that must be dealt with when
approaching open systems is that each of a set of heterogeneous
entities may potentially use a different domain ontology. This
heterogeneity is a critical impediment to efficient business
information exchange and to the automation of B2B processes.
FIPA has proposed an Ontology Agent (OA) for MAS
platforms. The OA provides a mapping service of expressions between
different ontologies. The ontology-mapping service is aligned with a
negotiation mediation service, allowing negotiation to take place
between entities using different domain ontologies.
Ontology-mapping
|
An important part of an Electronic Institution is the
"institutionalization" of norms that guide the behavior of agents. The
institution will enforce such norms and thereby provide a safe
interaction environment.
A normative framework has been designed in order to support
contract establishment, by providing a normative background that can be
exploited to different extends. A contract model was also defined that
allows agents to take advantage of the normative background or to adapt
it to specific contracting situations.
Normative framework
A
model of "institutional reality" (following Searle) is the basis for
the norm monitoring service. Norm enforcement is mainly based on
sanctions (violation-based norms) and on social punishment (through
reputation).
Norm
monitoring and enforcement
|
Trustworthiness estimation of
business partners is a fundamental support activity of several B2B
processes,
such as the selection of partners, negotiation, and contractual
services. This selection can be enhanced if supported by a
computational trust and reputation (CTR) service.
We propose a CTR model for Electronic Institution environments that
derives the confidence level of business entities. This model takes
into account the trust dynamics (e. g. the asymmetry in trust building
in different phases of the building process), and uses contextual
fitness to increase the reliability of the
confidence estimation on targets' agents in a given context.
|
Funded Projects
Trust-aware Automatic
E-Contract Negotiation in Agent-based Adaptive Normative
Environments (FCT Project PTDC/EIA-EIA/104420/2008)
Virtual Organizations (VO) are
a major trend in
cooperative business. Specialization and flexibility are some of the
key aspects of an every day more dynamic and global market. The concept
of VO has been applied to many forms of cooperative business relations,
like
Commercial relationships between business partners in the digital
economy are increasing in flexibility, and business deals tend to be
created whenever a business opportunity arises. Moreover, the
instability in demand increases the need for enterprises to search for
new partners, with an associated risk of dealing with entities whose
previous performance might be unknown beforehand. Therefore,
enterprises need mechanisms that allow, not only to evaluate the
confidence they have on current or potential partners (and to monitor
this confidence in a continuous and automatic way), but also to prevent
deceptive behaviours from partners or assist on reacting upon them when
prevention is not possible. In pursuing such a desiderate, several
research communities (e.g. social sciences, psychology, economics, and
distributed artificial intelligence) are studying and proposing
approaches for the development of trust and reputation models, to be
applied in the automation of the partner selection process. Also,
research is being done on the use of these models in the areas of
contract establishment and enforcement.
We have developed, over the last years, a computational platform called
Electronic Institution (EI) that aims at supporting software
agents’ interactions as a coordination framework, by assisting
the establishment of business agreements through appropriate electronic
contracting services. Furthermore, the EI also aims at promoting trust
by offering an enforceable normative environment, enriched with a
background normative framework facilitating contract establishment.
In this project, we propose to enrich the EI by studying and developing
models that concern the relationship between trust and reputation and
normative environments, a promising area of research referred to in the
literature (e.g. [CoPa02]) but that, to our knowledge, has not yet been
explored in a practical way. More specifically, we plan:
i) To develop a computational trust and reputation (CTR) system that
estimates the future behavior of partners taking as input, along with
the traditional aggregation of social evaluations, the context of the
business under appreciation and the similarities among different
businesses and amongst partners, in an effort to approximate this
procedure to human reasoning in the partner selection process. We
intend to develop this “contextual CTR” using methodologies
derived from the probabilistic and data mining fields.
ii) To go one step further in the contract negotiation process. Instead
of instantiating predefined contract templates, agents should be able
to automatically negotiate specific contract clauses, using trust
information as input. Therefore, in this topic we will specify
contracts that are amenable to be partially negotiated in an automatic
way (using a contract model and language that we have already
developed), and negotiation protocols that address contract parameters
and clauses. Furthermore, contract negotiation strategies will be
developed that allow agents to successfully negotiate in an automated
way.
iii) To adapt both the EI’s normative framework and the
enforcement mechanisms in place towards the actual performance of
contractual partners, in order to avoid constraining the environment
more than it is strictly necessary. Moreover, the effectiveness of
trust and reputation mechanisms that are in place should be taken into
account when addressing such adaptation. In this topic, we will
investigate case-based reasoning and unsupervised learning approaches
that enable us to enrich the normative environment with adaptation and
evolution features.
An underlying goal of this project is the collection of real data from
professional and industrial associations or electronic markets, and the
generation of simulated data validated through empirical evidences
obtained from industry.
The main expected results of this project are:
1 – A model of a CTR system that enriches the process of
computing trust values by taking as input contextual information;
2 – A model for the adaptive selection of enforcement policies
based on the evolving characterization of an agent population;
3 – A model for automatically negotiating contractual conditions
taking into account the trust values derived from the CTR system;
4 – A prototype that integrates the global solution for selection
of partners and contract negotiation in the EI – in our view, a
fundamental step towards the automation of inter-organizational
relationships;
5 – The dissemination of the developed models, experimental
results and validation of the prototype to the research community.
6 – The completion of 2 PhD theses and at least 1 MsC thesis.
This project will build on previous work of the involved participants.
These include knowledgeable researchers in the project’s main
research domains, namely PhD specialists in multi-agent systems and
data acquisition/analysis, and two PhD students working in the areas of
trust/reputation and normative environments for B2B.
Electronic Institutions providing Automatic Contracting for
Virtual Organizations (FCT Project POSC/EIA/57672/2004)
Abstract: Virtual Organizations (VO) are a major trend in
cooperative business. Specialization and flexibility are some of the
key aspects of an every day more dynamic and global market. The concept
of VO has been applied to many forms of cooperative business relations,
like outsourcing, supply chains, or temporary consortiums. We are
particularly interested in this later case, since it clearly addresses
the demand for flexible and dynamic arrangements between different
enterprises. Technological support to the creation and operation of
such relationships is arising in many forms. In particular, multi-agent
system technology is a suitable approach towards the automation of
(part of) the VO lifecycle. However, this technology generally assumes
that computational agents are autonomous entities that interact in
order to fulfill their private goals (that is, an enterprise’s
interests). In order to model realistic business engagements,
agreements must be expressed by means of negotiated Electronic
Contracts, which must be subject to a set of contractual norms and
amenable to monitoring and enforcing activities. This project aims at
developing a software framework – an Electronic Institution (EI)
– where agents representing different enterprises can interact in
a regulated fashion. The concept of an EI is related to real-world
institutions that define the norms and rules of the society, regulating
the activity of its individuals. We intend to specify and implement a
normative software framework that imposes such governance to
computational agents, including norms and rules related to contractual
activities. Within this normative layer, a representation formalism for
contracts will be devised, allowing contracts to be validated and their
execution to be verified. Together with these regulations,
institutional services assisting contractual activities are of primary
importance, specifically devoted to the creation and operation of VO.
These services include negotiation mediation, contract templates,
ontologies, and contract validation, monitoring and enforcement. The
execution of contracts that formalize cooperative business operations
poses some concerns in which the integration of different workflows is
concerned. In this project we also intend, as a complementary task, to
address the interdependencies between inter-organizational workflow
enactment and contract specification and execution monitoring. At a
more advanced stage, we consider the exploitation of the accumulated
experience from the operation of the EI, enabling the evolution of the
underlying normative framework. Finally, it is our goal to integrate
and evaluate the developed framework with a realistic case-study. This
will include the specification of a real-world scenario from the home
automation domain, for which a field company is integrated in the
project.
Main
Publications (most available here):
Book chapters:
- Joana Urbano, Ana Paula Rocha and Eugénio Oliveira. "Trust Evaluation for
Reliable Electronic Transactions between Business Partners", in Lecture Notes
in Business Information Processing, 2012, Volume 98, Part 3, 219-237, DOI:
10.1007/978-3-642-28563-9_12.
- Joana Urbano, Ana Paula Rocha, Eugénio Oliveira, Situation-Aware
Computational Trust Model for Selecting Partners. N.T. Nguyen (Ed.):
Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence V, LNCS 6910, pp.
84–105, 2011, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
- Joana Urbano, Ana Paula Rocha, Eugénio Oliveira, Extracting
Trustworthiness Tendencies Using the Frequency Increase Metric,
Enterprise Information Systems, LNBIP, 2011, Volume 73, Part 3, 208-221
- Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2010). “Monitoring Directed
Obligations with Flexible Deadlines: a Rule-based Approach”, in M. Baldoni,
J. Bentahar, J. Lloyd & M. B. Van Riemsdijk (eds.), Declarative Agent
Languages and Technologies VII, LNAI 5948, Springer, ISBN
978-3-642-11354-3, pp. 51-67.
- Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2010). “Directed Deadline
Obligations in Agent-based Business Contracts”, in Coordination,
Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems V, LNAI 6069,
Springer, ISBN 978-3-642-14961-0, pp. 225-240.
- Nicolás Hormazábal, Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Josep Lluis de la Rosa,
Eugénio Oliveira (2010). “An Approach for Virtual Organizations'
Dissolution”, in Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in
Agent Systems V, LNAI 6069, Springer, pp. 70-85, ISBN
978-3-642-14961-0.
-
Henrique
Lopes Cardoso, Daniel Dinis Teixeira, Eugénio Oliveira (2009). “Enhancing
Interoperability: Ontology-Mapping in an Electronic Institution”,
in K.
Fischer, J. P. Muller, J. Odell & A. J. Berre (eds.), Agent-based
Technologies and Applications for Enterprise
Interoperability, LNBIP 25, Springer, ISBN: 978-3-642-01667-7, pp.
47-62.
- Henrique
Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2009). “A Context-based
Institutional Normative Environment”, in J. Hubner, E. Matson, O.
Boissier
& V. Dignum (eds.), Coordination,
Organizations, Institutions,
and Norms in Agent Systems IV, LNAI 5428, Springer, ISBN:
978-3-642-00442-1, pp. 140-155.
- Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2008). “A
Contract Model for Electronic Institutions”, in J.S. Sichman et
al. (eds.), Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in
Agent Systems III, LNAI 4870, Springer, ISBN: 978-3-540-79002-0,
pp. 27-40.
- Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Ana Paula Rocha, Eugénio Oliveira
(2006). “Virtual Organization Support through
Electronic Institutions and Normative Multi-Agent Systems”, in
Jean-Philippe Rennar (ed.), Handbook of Research on Nature-Inspired
Computing for Economics and Management, Idea Group Inc., ISBN
1-59140-984-5, pp. 786-804.
- Andreia Malucelli, Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio
Oliveira (2006). “Enriching a MAS Environment with Institutional
Services”, in D. Weyns, H. Van Dyke Parunak & F. Michel
(eds.), Environments for Multi-Agent Systems II, LNAI 3830,
Springer, ISBN: 3-540-32614-6, pp. 105-120.
- Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2005). “Virtual Enterprise Normative Framework within
Electronic Institutions”, in M.-P. Gleizes, A. Omicini & F.
Zambonelli (eds.), Engineering Societies in the Agents World V,
LNAI 3451, Springer, ISBN 3-540-27330-1, pp. 14-32.
International Journals:
- Joana Urbano, Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Ana Paula Rocha, Eugénio Oliveira
(2012). “Trust and Normative Control in Multi-Agent Systems”, Advances in
Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence Journal, Vol. I, No. 1,
July 2012, pp. 43-52.
- Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2011). “Social Control in a
Normative Framework: An Adaptive Deterrence Approach”, Web Intelligence
and Agent Systems, An International Journal, IOS Press, Vol. 9, No. 4,
July 2011, pp. 363-375, ISSN 1570-1263.
- Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2008).
“Electronic Institutions for B2B: Dynamic Normative
Environments”, Artificial Intelligence & Law (special
issue on Agents, Institutions and Legal Theory), Springer, Vol. 16,
No. 1, March 2008, pp. 107-128, ISSN 0924-8463.
- Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2007). “Institutional Reality and Norms: Specifying and
Monitoring Agent Organizations”, International Journal of
Cooperative Information Systems (special
issue on Emergent Agent Societies), World Scientific Publishing Company, Vol. 16, No. 1,
March 2007, pp. 67-95, ISSN 0218-8430.
International Conference and Workshop Proceedings:
-
Joana Urbano, Henrique Lopes Cardoso,
Ana Paula Rocha and Eugénio Oliveira. "Trust and Normative Control in
Multi-agent Systems: An Empirical Study", in Highlights on Practical
Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Series: Advances in
Intelligent and Soft Computing, 2012, Volume 156/2012, 207-214, DOI:
10.1007/978-3-642-28762-6_25
-
Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Joana Urbano, Pedro Brandão, Ana Paula Rocha and
Eugénio Oliveira. "ANTE: Agreement Negotiation in Normative and
Trust-Enabled Environments", in Advances on Practical Applications of
Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Series: Advances in Intelligent and
Soft Computing, 2012, Volume 155/2012, 261-264, DOI:
10.1007/978-3-642-28786-2_33
-
Joana Urbano, Ana Paula Rocha, Eugénio Oliveira, Dynamic Agents’ Behavior
Model for Computational Trust. L. Antunes and H.S. Pinto (Eds.): EPIA 2011,
LNAI 7026, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 536–550, 2011
-
Joana Urbano, Ana Paula Rocha, Eugénio Oliveira, Trust-Based Selection of
Partners, C. Huemer and T. Setzer (Eds.): EC-Web 2011, LNBIP 85, pp.
221–232, 2011. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
-
Joana Urbano, Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2010). “Making
Electronic Contracting Operational and Trustworthy”, in Advances in
Artificial Intelligence – Proceedings of the 12th Ibero-American Conference
on Artificial Intelligence (IBERAMIA 2010), Lecture Notes on Artificial
Intelligence V. 6433, Springer, ISBN 978-3-642-16951-9, pp. 264-273, Bahía
Blanca, Argentina, November 1-5, 2010.
-
Joana Urbano, Ana Paula Rocha, Eugénio Oliveira (2010). "Trustworthiness
Tendency Incremental Extraction Using Information Gain”, Proceedings of the
2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and
Intelligent Agent Technology, Toronto, Canada, 1-3 September, 2010, pp.
411-414.
-
Joana Urbano, Ana Paula Rocha and Eugénio Oliveira (2010), "In the Search of
Better Deals Using Trust", proceedings of ECCAI'10 Workshop IAT4EB,
pp.25-30, July, Lisboa, Portugal.
-
Joana Urbano, Ana
Paula Rocha, Eugénio Oliveira (2010).
“Trust Estimation Using Contextual Fitness", 4th
International KES Symposium on Agents and Multi-agent Systems –
Technologies and Applications, Gdynia, Poland 23 - 25 June 2010
-
Agnieszka Danek, Joana Urbano, Ana Paula Rocha, Eugénio Oliveira (2010).
“Engaging the Dynamics of Trust in Computational Trust and Reputation
Systems", to be presented at the 4th International KES Symposium on Agents
and Multi-agent Systems – Technologies and Applications, Gdynia, Poland 23 -
25 June 2010
-
Joana Urbano, Ana Paula Rocha, Eugénio Oliveira (2010). “Refining the
Trustworthiness Assessment of Suppliers through Extraction of Stereotypes",
12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS
2010), Funchal, Portugal, 8-12 June 2010, pp. 85-92. BEST PAPER AWARD
inTrack "Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems"
-
Joana Urbano, Ana Paula Rocha, Eugénio Oliveira, "A Trust Aggregation Engine
that Uses Contextual Information", EUMAS 2009- 7th European Workshop on
Multi-Agent Systems, 12pp., Ayia Napa, Cyprus, December 2009.
-
Joana Urbano, Ana Paula Rocha and Eugénio Oliveira. "Computing Confidence
Values: Does Trust Dynamics Matter?", in L. Seabra Lopes, N. Lau, P. Mariano
& L. M. Rocha (eds.), Progress in Artificial Intelligence – 14th
Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA 2009), Springer,
ISBN 978-3-642-04685-8, pp. 520-531, Aveiro, Portugal, October 12-15, 2009.
-
Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2009). “Risk Tolerance and Social
Awareness: Adapting Deterrence Sanctions to Agent Populations”, in L. Seabra
Lopes, N. Lau, P. Mariano & L. M. Rocha (eds.), Progress in Artificial
Intelligence – 14th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA
2009), Springer, ISBN 978-3-642-04685-8, pp. 560-571, Aveiro, Portugal,
October 12-15, 2009.
-
Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2009). “Adaptive Deterrence
Sanctions in a Normative Framework”, in The 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM
International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT 2009),
IEEE Computer Society, ISBN 978-0-7695-3801-3, pp. 36-43, Milan, Italy,
September 15-18 , 2009.
-
Henrique
Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2009).
“Flexible
Deadlines for Directed Obligations in Agent-based Business Contracts
(Extended
Abstract)”, in Decker, Sichman, Sierra and Castelfranchi (eds.),
Proceedings of The 8th International
Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2009),
IFAAMAS,
pp. 1307-1308, Budapest, Hungary, May 10–15, 2009.
- Joana Urbano, Ana Paula Rocha, and Eugenio Oliveira (2009) "Trust
Evaluation for Reliable Electronic Transactions between Business
Partners" in Klaus Fischer, Jorg P. Muller, James Odell, Arne J. Berre
(eds.), Proceedings of The AAMAS’09 Workshop on Agent-based
Technologies and applications for enterprise interOPerability (ATOP),
pp. 85-96, Budapest, Hungary, May 12, 2009.
-
Henrique
Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2009).
“Directed
Deadline Obligations in Agent-based Business Contracts”, in A.
Artikis & W.
Vasconcelos (eds.), Proceedings of The
AAMAS’09 Workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and
Norms in Agent
Systems (COIN), pp. 77-92, Budapest, Hungary, May 12, 2009.
-
Nicolás
Hormazábal, Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Josep Lluis de la Rosa,
Eugénio
Oliveira (2009).
“An Approach for Virtual Organizations'
Dissolution”, in A. Artikis
& W. Vasconcelos (eds.), Proceedings
of The AAMAS’09 Workshop on Coordination, Organization,
Institutions and Norms
in Agent Systems (COIN), pp. 93-108, Budapest, Hungary, May 12,
2009.
-
Henrique
Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2009).
“Monitoring
Cooperative Business Contracts in an Institutional Environment”,
Proceedings of The 11th International
Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2009), Milan,
Italy, May 6-10, 2009.
-
Henrique
Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2008).
“Norm
Defeasibility in an Institutional Normative Framework”, in M.
Ghallab, C.
Spyropoulos, N. Fakotakis & N. Avouris (eds.), Proceedings
of The 18th European Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (ECAI 2008), IOS Press, ISBN 978-1-58603-891-5, pp.
468-472, Patras,
Greece, July 21-25, 2008.
-
Henrique
Lopes Cardoso, Daniel Dinis Teixeira, Eugénio Oliveira (2008).
“An
Ontology-Mapping Service for Agent-Based Automated Negotiation”,
in K. Fischer,
A. J. Berre, J. P. Muller & J. Odell (eds.), Proceedings
of The AAMAS’08 Workshop on Agent-based Technologies and
Applications
for Enterprise Interoperability (ATOP), pp. 1-12, Estoril,
Portugal, May 13,
2008.
- P. Leitão and J. Mendes (2008), “Agent-based
Inter-Organizational Workflow Management System for Electronic
Institutions”, accepted for publication in the Proceedings of
the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Human-Machine Systems
(DHMS’08), Athens, Greece, 9-12 March.
- P. Leitão, J. Mendes (2007), “Agent-based
Inter-Organizational Workflow Management System”, in V.
Marík, A. Colombo and V. Vyatkin (eds.), Holonic and
Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing: 3rd International Conference on
Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems
(HoloMAS’07), LNAI, Springer.
- Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Paulo Leitão, Eugénio
Oliveira (2006). “An Approach to
Inter-Organizational Workflow Management in an Electronic
Institution”, in 12th IFAC Symposium on
Information Control Problems in Manufacturing (INCOM’2006), Vol.
I – Information Systems, Control and Interoperability, Track
“Holonic and Multi-agent Technologies for Industrial
Systems”, IFAC, pp. 429-434, Saint-Etienne, France, May 17th-19th
2006. Best paper award within the track “Holonic
and Multi-agent Technologies for Industrial Systems”
- Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Andreia Malucelli, Ana Paula Rocha,
Eugénio Oliveira (2005). “Institutional
Services for Dynamic Virtual Organizations”, in L. M.
Camarinha-Matos, H. Afsarmanesh & A. Ortiz (eds.), Collaborative
Networks and Their Breeding Environments – 6th IFIP Working
Conference on Virtual Enterprises (PRO-VE’05), Springer, ISBN
0-387-28259-9, pp. 521-528, Valencia, Spain, September 26th-28th
2005.
- Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Eugénio Oliveira (2005).
“Towards an Institutional Environment using Norms
for Contract Performance”, in M. Pechoucek, P. Petta & L. Z.
Varga (eds.), Multi-Agent Systems and Applications IV – 4th
International Central and Eastern European Conference on Multi-Agent
Systems (CEEMAS’05), LNAI 3690, Springer, ISBN 3-540-29046-X,
pp. 256-265, Budapest, Hungary, September 15th-17th
2005.
Reports:
- Rui Neves, “Interacção
e Contratação em Instituições
Electrónicas”, Relatório Final de Bolsa de
Investigação, May 2008.
- Daniel Teixeira, “Electronic
Institution – Scenery & Reputation”,
Scolarship Report, December 2007.
- Rui Neves, “Electronic
Institutions providing Automatic Contracting for Virtual Organizations”,
Relatório Final de Bolsa de Investigação, April
2007.
- Bernd Schneiders, “Implementation
of an ontology mapping algorithm”, Internship at University
Oporto, Final Report, February 2007.
Thesis:
- Sérgio Moura, "Desempenho Contratual e
Medidas de Confiança em Instituições Eletrónicas", MSc Thesis, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade
do Porto, 2011.
- Henrique Lopes Cardoso,
Electronic
Institutions with Normative Environments for Agent-based E-contracting,
PhD Thesis, FEUP, 2010.
- Filipe Silva, "Sistema
de Confiança e
Reputação para Selecção de Empresas em
Sistemas B2B", MSc Thesis, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade
do
Porto, 2009.
- Orlando Ribas Fernandes, “Construção e
Exploração de Ontologias para a Negociação
Automática em Empresas Virtuais”, MSc Thesis, Faculdade de
Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, 2007.
- Andreia Malucelli, “Ontology-based Services for Agents
Interoperability”, PhD Thesis, Faculdade de Engenharia da
Universidade do Porto, 2006.