Policy-driven planning in coalitions - A case study

(c)IFAAMASPeer reviewedPostprin

Constraint rule-based programming of norms for electronic institutions

Peer reviewedPostprin

Implementing Norms that Govern Non-Dialogical Actions

The governance of open multi-agent systems is particular important since those systems are composed by heterogeneous, autonomous and independently designed agents. Such governance is usually provided by the establishment of norms that regulate the actions of agents. Although there are several approaches that formally describe norms, there are still few of them that propose their implementation. In additions, only one that provides support for implementing norms deals with non-dialogical actions since the others only deal with dialogical actions, i.e., actions that provide the interchange of messages between agents. In this paper we propose the implementation of norms that govern non-dialogical actions by extending one of the approaches that regulate dialogical ones. Non-dialogical actions are not related to the interactions between agents but to tasks executed by agents that characterize, for instance, the access to resources, their commitment to play roles or their movement into environments and organizations

Declarative Mechanism Design

Regulation of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Declarative Electronic Institutions (DEIs) was a multidisciplinary research topic of the past decade involving (Physical and Software) Agents and Law since the beginning, but recently evolved towards News-claimed Robot Lawyer since 2016. One of these first proposals of restricting the behaviour of Software Agentswas Electronic Institutions.However, with the recent reformulation of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) as Deep Learning (DL), Security, Privacy,Ethical and Legal issues regarding the use of DL has raised concerns in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Community. Now that the Regulation of MAS is almost correctly addressed, we propose the Regulation of Artificial Neural Networks as Agent-based Training of a special type of regulated Artificial Neural Network that we call Institutional Neural Network (INN).The main purpose of this paper is to bring attention to Artificial Teaching (AT) and to give a tentative answer showing a proof-of-concept implementation of Regulated Deep Learning (RDL). This paper introduces the former concept and provide sI, a language previously used to model declaratively and extend Electronic Institutions, as a means to regulate the execution of Artificial Neural Networks and their interactions with Artificial Teachers (ATs

The Norm Implementation Problem in Normative Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract. The norm implementation problem consists in how to see to it that the agents in a system comply with the norms specified for that system by the system designer. It is part of the more general problem of how to synthesize or create norms for multi-agent systems, by, for example, highlighting the choice between regimentation and enforcement, or the punishment associated with a norm violation. In this paper we discuss how various ways to implement norms in a multi-agent system can be distinguished in a formal game-theoretic framework. In particular, we show how different types of norm implementation can all be uniformly specified and verified as types of transformations of extensive games. We introduce the notion of retarded preconditions to implement norms, and we illustrate the framework and the various ways to implement norms in the blocks world environment

Executable specication of open multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems where the agents are developed by parties with competing interests, and where there is no access to an agent's internal state, are often classi ed as `open'. The members of such systems may inadvertently fail to, or even deliberately choose not to, conform to the system speci cation. Consequently, it is necessary to specify the normative relations that may exist between the members, such as permission, obligation, and institutional power. We present a framework being developed for executable speci cation of open multi-agent systems. We adopt a bird's eye view of these systems, as opposed to an agent's perspective whereby it reasons about how it should act. This paper is devoted to the presentation of various examples from the NetBill protocol formalised in terms of institutional power, permission and obligation. We express the system speci cation in the Event Calculus and execute the speci cation by means of a logic programming implementation. We also give several example formalisations of sanctions for dealing with violations of permissions and obligations. We distinguish between an open multi-agent system and the procedure by which an agent enters and leaves the system. We present examples from the speci cation of a role-management protocol for NetBill, and demonstrate the interplay between such a protocol and the corresponding multi-agent system

Making norms concrete

In systems based on organisational specifications a reoccurring problem remains to be solved in the disparity between the level of abstractness of the organisational concepts and the concepts used in the implementation. Organisational specifications (deliberately) abstract from general practice, which creates a need to relate the abstract concepts used in the specification to concrete ones used in practice. A solution for this problem is the use of counts-as statements, which, by defining the social reality, provide the concrete concepts their institutional and organisational meaning. Continuing work on the implementation of counts-as to relate abstract and concrete concepts in agent-based systems, this paper investigates the implementation of counts-as statements in Drools to relate abstract organisational specifications and its norms to concrete situations.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

mWater Analysis

The mWater scenario requires the expression and use of regulations of different sorts: from actual laws and regulations issued by governments, to policies and local regulations issued by basin managers, to social norms that prevail in a given community of users. Some will be regimented as part of the electronic institutional framework specification, but others need to be expressed in a declarative form so that one may reason about them, both off- and on-line, both at design and at run time, and both from the institutional (or legislative) perspective and the agent's individual perspective. Issues that are relevant in this respect range from the choice of expressive formalism to the decision-making strategies that agents might use to comply or disobey regulations. Thus, structural aspects like governance, dynamics of norms (also from the legislative and execution perspectives) as well as criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of norms may and need to be explored in the demonstrator.Botti Navarro, VJ.; Garrido Tejero, A.; Giret Boggino, AS.; Igual, F.; Noriega, P.; Igual (2013). mWater Analysis. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/3210

Passive verification of the strategyproofness of mechanisms in open environments

(Article begins on next page) The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation Kang, Laura, and David C Parkes. 2006. Passive verification of the strategyproofness of mechanisms in open environments. I

Communicating open systems

Just as conventional institutions are organisational structures for coordinating the activities of multiple interacting individuals, electronic institutions provide a computational analogue for coordinating the activities of multiple interacting software agents. In this paper, we argue that open multi-agent systems can be effectively designed and implemented as electronic institutions, for which we provide a comprehensive computational model. More specifically, the paper provides an operational semantics for electronic institutions, specifying the essential data structures, the state representation and the key operations necessary to implement them. We specify the agent workflow structure that is the core component of such electronic institutions and particular instantiations of knowledge representation languages that support the institutional model. In so doing, we provide the first formal account of the electronic institution concept in a rigorous and unambiguous way