Modeling electronic institutions with extended colored Petri net

One of the most fundamental challenges in multi-agent system engineering is to enable predictable and reliable interaction amongst group of autonomy agents. Electronic Institution (EI) has been proposed as an important framework to deal with these challenges. A colored Petri net transducer (CPNt) approach is presented to represent an EI visually and formally. With existing CPN tools, an EI model can be simulated and verified automatically. Validated EI model serves as a fundamental mechanism to influence and constraint interactive behaviors of autonomy agents. As a result, predictable and reliable multi-agent system can be obtained. Comparing with other approaches, this approach has solid theoretic basis as it is extended from Petri net. Therefore existing engineering methodology of Petri net can be adapted to engineering electronic institution conveniently. A simple example is applied to illustrate the whole process of the proposed approach.