BASES DE PRESENTACION DE LOS ESTADOS FINANCIEROS CONSOLIDADOS Y CRITERIOS CONTABLES

There is a recent trend in combining both organisational and institutional aspects in the same framework, in works such as MoiseInst_{[Gˆateau et al.,2005], OMNI [Dignum}

et al.,2004;V´azquez-Salceda et al.,2005] and the language NLP [H ¨ubner et al.,2011]. MoiseInst[Gˆateau et al.,2005], seen by the creators as an institution organisation spec- ification, is founded on the Moise+[H ¨ubner et al.,2002] organisational model and fo- cuses on specifying agent rights and describing the duties of each society role through four types of specifications, Structural (SS), Functional (FS), Contextual (CS) and Nor- mative (NS). Normative specification (NS) extends the Moise+ deontic specification and defines rights and duties of roles and groups on a mission (set of goals) and in

a specific context; Structural specification defines roles that agents enact and relations between these roles as well as an additional level (group) to which roles might be- long and in which interactions take place; Functional specification defines all goals that have to be achieved; Contextual specification describes a set of contexts influ- encing the dynamics of the organisation as well as the transitions between contexts. The creators show how MoiseInst may be used in interactive games, both on the agent operating layer (where avatars operate as autonomous agents) as well as on the mul- timedia game management and control layer (where an institutional middleware is dedicated to the arbitration and supervision of the whole organisation). While a pow- erful and expressive organisational framework, norm specification in MoiseInst lacks conditional norms (only allows time limitations and special conditions in the norm definition). We are also not aware of any functional implementation of MoiseInst. Organizational Model for Normative Institutions (OMNI) [Dignum et al.,2004;V´azquez- Salceda et al., 2005] brings together some aspects from two existing frameworks: OperA [Dignum,2004] and HARMONIA [V´azquez-Salceda, 2004; V´azquez-Salceda and Dignum, 2003]. OMNI is spread throughout three dimensions that describe different characterisations of the environment. The Normative Dimension of the organisation (specifying the mechanisms of social order, in terms of common norms and rules, that members are expected to adhere to), the Organisational Dimension (which describes the structure of an organisation, an can therefore be viewed as a means to manage com- plex dynamics in societies) and the Ontological Dimension (defining environment and contextual relations and communication aspects in organisations). In OMNI, the envi- ronment is represented in three levels: 1) the Abstract level which defines a high level system abstraction similar to the requirements analysis. It contains an ontology of the model describing all the different organisational terms such as norms, rules, roles, sanctions, etc.; 2) the Concrete level, supporting the design of the normative institution. Its normative dimension defines the norms and rules of the system, the organisational dimension defines the organisational structure and its ontological dimension defines concrete ontological concepts.; and 3) the Implementation level, where the design of the normative and organisational dimensions is implemented. In particular, mechanisms for role enactment, norm enforcement, a procedural domain ontology, protocols and the communication language used between the agents are proposed. There is no full implementation supporting OMNI and the closest practical framework is the ALIVE toolset.

ALIVE [Lam et al.,2009] is a multi-layered framework defined by the EU funded ICT- ALIVE project11_{, supporting the design, deployment and maintenance of distributed}

systems. ALIVE is an evolution of OMNI which uses a model-driven approach to specify the conceptual framework with metamodels. It defines three levels of abstrac- tion: The organisation, the coordination and the service level. The organisational level supports an explicit representation of the organisational structure of the system. The

organisational description includes roles, normative relations (e.g. permissions, obli- gations), and interaction scenes. The specification makes use of the OperA [Dignum, 2004] model extended with HARMONIA norms. The coordination level transforms the organisational representation into service-oriented workflows, specifying patterns of interaction between Semantic Web services. Workflows for agent coordination at run- time achieving organisational goals are stored. Amongst others, this level includes ele- ments such as an ontology (containing available actions, possible goals to be achieved, the resources available in the domain, etc.) and a JSHOP2 planner producing plans to be executed by the agents. Finally, the service level supports the semantic description of services. Mechanisms for matchmaking (selection of the most appropriate service for a given task) and Web services dynamic composition are supported. A monitoring mechanism is used to track various types of runtime activities. Although there exists an ALIVE toolset fully supporting the framework, there are two main limitations: 1) The framework is focused on Service-Oriented environments: in ALIVE agents coor- dinate the orchestration of existing Web services; 2) Agents are not able to generate plans at runtime, but they can select precomputed plans that have been automatically built by an offline planner according to the organisation specification.

In [H ¨ubner et al., 2011] the authors, based on primitives like norms and obligations, introduce a Normative Programming Language (NPL), that is, a language that is ded- icated to the development of normative programs. They then present an NPL inter- preter to compute: (1) whether some operation will bring the organisation into an inconsistent state (where inconsistency is defined by means of the specified regimen- tations), and (2) the current state of the obligations. They also define the Normative Organisation Programming Language (NOPL), a particular class of NPL specialised for MOISE [Hannoun et al.,2000]. Finally, they show how MOISE’s organisation mod- elling language (with primitives such as roles, groups, and goals) can be reduced to NPL programs. While the approach provides an approach focused on monitoring norms within an execution system, no weight is given on how to choose amongst and evaluate possible operations to be executed in order to achieve goals.

Recent work detailed in [Lam et al., 2010] represents the agent organisation using Semantic Web languages. In the framework, norms (permissions, obligations, pro- hibitions and power) over agent actions as well as roles and role classification (a hi- erarchical structure between roles) are represented using OWL [Antoniou and van Harmelen,2003] and SWRL12. Further to this, workflow specifications and the ontolo- gies are made available to the agents through a centralised service which maintains the knowledge, and updates it. Workflows are graphs with states and connections (including AND/OR edges) between them and have input/output variables. They describe the tasks to be executed and the flow of control within the system. Tasks might be atomic or might be complex requiring a workflow to be executed. Agents are created dynamically by an algorithm (which takes into account the organisational norms). The input to the algorithm is a set of workflows and an ontology, and the

output includes a set of software agents with organisational roles and tasks associated with them, giving priority first to obligations, then to institutionalised power and per- missions, and finally to permissions. Each agent then is able to start an independent process that will support the enactment of the workflow. Exceptions are handled out- side the agent-view perspective and dealt with appropriately, according to whether an agent or a task has failed. While more practical, this approach follows service- oriented model and does not provide such in-depth cover of organisational elements and focuses on the coordination and workflow enactment process over the tasks to be executed.