ANTE: A Framework Integrating Negotiation, Norms and Trust

This chapter presents the ANTE framework for Social Coordination. In multi-agent systems, social coordination is related with a number of agreement technologies: negotiation as a means of reaching agreements; organizational or normative structures as social constructs to regulate interactions; trust as a mechanism to assess agent performance when acting while subject to norms. The ANTE framework addresses the issue of social coordination from a comprehensive perspective, exploring negotiation as a mechanism for establishing some normative coordination infrastructure, based on the notion of a contract. Contracts are monitored for compliance, and their enactment phase enables the collection of behavioral data that can be used by computational trust models.