Deriving individual obligations from collective obligations

A collective obligation is an obligation directed to a group of agents so that the group, as a whole, is obliged to achieve a given task. The problem investigated here is the impact of collective obligations on individual obligations,i.e. obligations directed to single agents of the group. In this case, we claim that the derivation of individual obligations from collective obligations depends on several parameters among which the ability of the agents (i.e. what they can do) and their own personal commitments (i.e. what they are determined to do). As for checking if these obligations are fulfilled or not, we need to know what are the actual actions performed by the agents

Deriving individual obligations from collective obligations

A collective obligation is an obligation directed to a group of agents so that the group, as a whole, is obliged to achieve a given task. The problem investigated here is the impact of collective obligations to individual obligations, i.e. obligations directed to single agents of the group. The groups we consider do not have any particular hierarchical structure nor have an institutionalized representative agent. In this case, we claim that the derivation of individual obligations from collective obligations depends on several parameters among which the ability of the agents (i.e. what they can do) and their own personal commitments (i.e. what they are determined to do). As for checking if these obligations are fulfilled or not, we need to know what are the actual actions performed by the agents. This present paper addresses these questions in the rather general case when the collective obligations are conditional ones

Desires, norms and constraints

This paper deals with modeling mental states of a rational agent, in particular states based on agent’s desires. It shows that the world the agent belongs to forces it to restrict its desires. More precisely, desires of a rational agent are restricted by the constraints that exist in the world and which express what is possible or necessary. Furthermore, if the agent is law-abiding, its desires are restricted by the regulations that are defined in the world and which express what is obligatory, permitted or forbidden. This paper characterizes how desires are restricted depending on the fact that the agent is law-abiding or not. This work considers the general case when the agent orders its own desires according to a preference order. The solution is based on modeling desires, regulations and constraints in an unique formal system which is a logic of conditional preferences

Risk-Aware Access Control And XACML

In this thesis, we propose an extension of an existing RAAC abstract model that supports risk assessment, risk-aware authorisation decision making and the use of system and user obligations as risk mitigation methods. We also propose an implementation of the extended abstract model based on XACML, a standard that defines an XML-based language for the specification of access control policies, requests and responses. We develop a novel Risk-Aware Group Based Access Control (RA-GBAC