Multi-agent systems where the members are developed by parties with competing interests, and where there is no access to a member's internal state, are often classified as 'open'. The specification of open agent systems of this sort is largely seen as a design-time activity. Moreover, there is no support for run-time specification modification. Due to environmental, social, or other conditions, however, it is often required to revise the specification during the system execution. To address

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... requirement, we present an infrastructure for 'dynamic' specifications, that is, specifications that may be modified at run-time by the agents. The infrastructure consists of well-defined procedures for proposing a modification of the 'rules of the game' as well as decision-making over and enactment of proposed modifications. We employ the action language C + to formalise dynamic specifications, and the 'Causal Calculator' implementation of C + to execute the specifications. We illustrate our infrastructure by presenting a dynamic specification of a resource-sharing protocol.