Incentivising monitoring in open normative systems

We present an approach to incentivising monitoring for norm violations in open multi-agent systems such as Wikipedia. In such systems, there is no crisp definition of a norm violation; rather, it is a matter of judgement whether an agent’s behaviour conforms to generally accepted standards of behaviour. Agents may legitimately disagree about borderline cases. Using ideas from scrip systems and peer prediction, we show how to design a mechanism that incentivises agents to monitor each other’s behaviour for norm violations. The mechanism keeps the probability of undetected violations (submissions that the majority of the community would consider not conforming to standards) low, and is robust against collusion by the monitoring agents

Incentive-compatible mechanisms for norm monitoring in open multi-agent systems

We consider the problem of detecting norm violations in open multi-agent systems (MAS).We show how, using ideas from scrip systems, we can design mechanisms where the agents comprising the MAS are incentivised to monitor the actions of other agents for norm violations. The cost of providing the incentives is not borne by the MAS and does not come from fines charged for norm violations (fines may be impossible to levy in a system where agents are free to leave and rejoin again under a different identity). Instead, monitoring incentives come from (scrip) fees for accessing the services provided by the MAS. In some cases, perfect monitoring (and hence enforcement) can be achieved: no norms will be violated in equilibrium. In other cases, we show that, while it is impossible to achieve perfect enforcement, we can get arbitrarily close; we can make the probability of a norm violation in equilibrium arbitrarily small. We show using simulations that our theoretical results, which apply to systems with a large number of agents, hold for multi-agent systems with as few as 1000 agents—the system rapidly converges to the steady-state distribution of scrip tokens necessary to ensure monitoring and then remains close to the steady state

Norm Monitoring under Partial Action Observability

In the context of using norms for controlling multi-agent systems, a vitally important question that has not yet been addressed in the literature is the development of mechanisms for monitoring norm compliance under partial action observability. This paper proposes the reconstruction of unobserved actions to tackle this problem. In particular, we formalise the problem of reconstructing unobserved actions, and propose an information model and algorithms for monitoring norms under partial action observability using two different processes for reconstructing unobserved actions. Our evaluation shows that reconstructing unobserved actions increases significantly the number of norm violations and fulfilments detected.Comment: Accepted at the IEEE Transaction on Cybernetic

Norm Monitoring under Partial Action Observability

In the context of using norms for controlling multi-agent systems, a vitally important question that has not yet been addressed in the literature is the development of mechanisms for monitoring norm compliance under partial action observability. This paper proposes the reconstruction of unobserved actions to tackle this problem. In particular, we formalise the problem of reconstructing unobserved actions, and propose an information model and algorithms for monitoring norms under partial action observability using two different processes for reconstructing unobserved actions. Our evaluation shows that reconstructing unobserved actions increases significantly the number of norm violations and fulfilments detected

Severity-sensitive norm-governed multi-agent planning

This research was funded by Selex ES. The software developed during this research, including the norm analysis and planning algorithms, the simulator and harbour protection scenario used during evaluation is freely available from doi:10.5258/SOTON/D0139Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Bounded-Monitor Placement in Normative Environments

ISSN: 16130073 Funding: This work is partially supported by grants from CNPq/Brazil numbers 132339/2016-1 and 305969/2016-1.Publisher PD

Norm-based and commitment-driven agentification of the Internet of Things

There are no doubts that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has conquered the ICT industry to the extent that many governments and organizations are already rolling out many anywhere,anytime online services that IoT sustains. However, like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down IoT practical adoption including the passive nature and privacy invasion of things. This paper examines how to empower things with necessary capabilities that would make them proactive and responsive. This means things can, for instance reach out to collaborative peers, (un)form dynamic communities when necessary, avoid malicious peers, and be “questioned” for their actions. To achieve such empowerment, this paper presents an approach for agentifying things using norms along with commitments that operationalize these norms. Both norms and commitments are specialized into social (i.e., application independent) and business (i.e., application dependent), respectively. Being proactive, things could violate commitments at run-time, which needs to be detected through monitoring. In this paper, thing agentification is illustrated with a case study about missing children and demonstrated with a testbed that uses different IoT-related technologies such as Eclipse Mosquitto broker and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol. Some experiments conducted upon this testbed are also discussed

Policy-driven planning in coalitions - A case study

(c)IFAAMASPeer reviewedPostprin