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:

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.

 

Q-negotiation protocol

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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:

  1. 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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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

  9. 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

  10. 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"
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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”
  25. 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.
  26. 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:

  1. Rui Neves, “Interacção e Contratação em Instituições Electrónicas”, Relatório Final de Bolsa de Investigação, May 2008.
  2. Daniel Teixeira, “Electronic Institution – Scenery & Reputation”, Scolarship Report, December 2007.
  3. Rui Neves, “Electronic Institutions providing Automatic Contracting for Virtual Organizations”, Relatório Final de Bolsa de Investigação, April 2007.
  4. Bernd Schneiders, “Implementation of an ontology mapping algorithm”, Internship at University Oporto, Final Report, February 2007.

Thesis:

  1. Sérgio Moura, "Desempenho Contratual e Medidas de Confiança em Instituições Eletrónicas", MSc Thesis, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, 2011.
  2. Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Electronic Institutions with Normative Environments for Agent-based E-contracting, PhD Thesis, FEUP, 2010.
  3. Filipe Silva, "Sistema de Confiança e Reputação para Selecção de Empresas em Sistemas B2B", MSc Thesis, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, 2009.
  4. 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.
  5. Andreia Malucelli, “Ontology-based Services for Agents Interoperability”, PhD Thesis, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, 2006.