Abstract
Institutions, also referred to as normative systems, offer ameans to govern open systems, in particular open multi-agent systems.Research in logics, and subsequently tools, has led to support for thespecification, verification and enactment of institutions. Most effort todate has focused on the design-time properties of institutions (either onthe normative or the system level), such as whether a particular state ofaffairs is reachable or not from a given set of initial conditions. Such modelsare useful in forcing the designer to state their intentions precisely,and for testing (design-time) properties. However, we identify two problemsin the direct utilization of design-time models in the governance oflive (run-time) systems: (i) over-specification of constraints on agent autonomyand (ii) generation of design-time model artefacts. In this paperwe present a methodology to tackle these two problems and extract runtimereasoning components from a design-time model. We demonstratehow to derive an event-based run-time model of institutions that can beincorporated into the capabilities of autonomous BDI agents to addressthe issues above in order to realize practical norm-governed multi-agentsystems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.