A trust framework for peer-to-peer interaction in ad hoc networks

PhDAs a wider public is increasingly adopting mobile devices with diverse applications, the idea of who to trust while on the move becomes a crucial one. The need to find dependable partners to interact is further exacerbated in situations where one finds oneself out of the range of backbone structures such as wireless base stations or cellular networks. One solution is to generate self-started networks, a variant of which is the ad hoc network that promotes peer-to-peer networking. The work in this thesis is aimed at defining a framework for such an ad hoc network that provides ways for participants to distinguish and collaborate with their most trustworthy neighbours. In this framework, entities create the ability to generate trust information by directly observing the behaviour of their peers. Such trust information is also shared in order to assist those entities in situations where prior interactions with their target peers may not have existed. The key novelty points of the framework focus on aggregating the trust evaluation process around the most trustworthy nodes thereby creating a hierarchy of nodes that are distinguished by the class, defined by cluster heads, to which they belong. Furthermore, the impact of such a framework in generating additional overheads for the network is minimised through the use of clusters. By design, the framework also houses a rule-based mechanism to thwart misbehaving behaviour or non-cooperation. Key performance indicators are also defined within this work that allow a framework to be quickly analysed through snapshot data, a concept analogous to those used within financial circles when assessing companies. This is also a novel point that may provide the basis for directly comparing models with different underlying technologies. The end result is a trust framework that fully meets the basic requirements for a sustainable model of trust that can be developed onto an ad hoc network and that provides enhancements in efficiency (using clustering) and trust performance

Automated Service Negotiation Between Autonomous Computational Agents

PhDMulti-agent systems are a new computational approach for solving real world, dynamic and open system problems. Problems are conceptualized as a collection of decentralised autonomous agents that collaborate to reach the overall solution. Because of the agents autonomy, their limited rationality, and the distributed nature of most real world problems, the key issue in multi-agent system research is how to model interactions between agents. Negotiation models have emerged as suitable candidates to solve this interaction problem due to their decentralised nature, emphasis on mutual selection of an action, and the prevalence of negotiation in real social systems. The central problem addressed in this thesis is the design and engineering of a negotiation model for autonomous agents for sharing tasks and/or resources. To solve this problem a negotiation protocol and a set of deliberation mechanisms are presented which together coordinate the actions of a multiple agent system. In more detail, the negotiation protocol constrains the action selection problem solving of the agents through the use of normative rules of interaction. These rules temporally order, according to the agents' roles, communication utterances by specifying both who can say what, as well as when. Specifically, the presented protocol is a repeated, sequential model where offers are iteratively exchanged. Under this protocol, agents are assumed to be fully committed to their utterances and utterances are private between the two agents. The protocol is distributed, symmetric, supports bi and/or multi-agent negotiation as well as distributive and integrative negotiation. In addition to coordinating the agent interactions through normative rules, a set of mechanisms are presented that coordinate the deliberation process of the agents during the ongoing negotiation. Whereas the protocol normatively describes the orderings of actions, the mechanisms describe the possible set of agent strategies in using the protocol. These strategies are captured by a negotiation architecture that is composed of responsive and deliberative decision mechanisms. Decision making with the former mechanism is based on a linear combination of simple functions called tactics, which manipulate the utility of deals. The latter mechanisms are subdivided into trade-off and issue manipulation mechanisms. The trade-off mechanism generates offers that manipulate the value, rather than the overall utility, of the offer. The issue manipulation mechanism aims to increase the likelihood of an agreement by adding and removing issues into the negotiation set. When taken together, these mechanisms represent a continuum of possible decision making capabilities: ranging from behaviours that exhibit greater awareness of environmental resources and less to solution quality, to behaviours that attempt to acquire a given solution quality independently of the resource consumption. The protocol and mechanisms are empirically evaluated and have been applied to real world task distribution problems in the domains of business process management and telecommunication management. The main contribution and novelty of this research are: i) a domain independent computational model of negotiation that agents can use to support a wide variety of decision making strategies, ii) an empirical evaluation of the negotiation model for a given agent architecture in a number of different negotiation environments, and iii) the application of the developed model to a number of target domains. An increased strategy set is needed because the developed protocol is less restrictive and less constrained than the traditional ones, thus supporting development of strategic interaction models that belong more to open systems. Furthermore, because of the combination of the large number of environmental possibilities and the size of the set of possible strategies, the model has been empirically investigated to evaluate the success of strategies in different environments. These experiments have facilitated the development of general guidelines that can be used by designers interested in developing strategic negotiating agents. The developed model is grounded from the requirement considerations from both the business process management and telecommunication application domains. It has also been successfully applied to five other real world scenarios

Mass Atrocities and their Prevention

Counting conservatively, and ignoring physical injuries and mental trauma, data show about 100 million mass atrocity-related deaths since 1900. Occurring in war and in peacetime, and of enormous scale, severity, and brutality, they are geographically widespread, occur with surprising frequency, and can be long-lasting in their adverse effects on economic and human development, wellbeing, and wealth. As such, they are a major economic concern. This article synthesizes very diverse and widely dispersed theoretical and empirical literatures, addressing two gaps: a “mass atrocities gap” in the economics literature and an “economics gap” in mass atrocities scholarship. Our goals are, first, for noneconomists to learn how economic inquiry contributes to understanding the causes and conduct of mass atrocities and possibly to their mitigation and prevention and, second, to survey and synthesize for economists a broad sweep of literatures to serve as a common platform on which to base further work in this field

Foundations of Trusted Autonomy

Trusted Autonomy; Automation Technology; Autonomous Systems; Self-Governance; Trusted Autonomous Systems; Design of Algorithms and Methodologie

Naval Research Program 2019 Annual Report

NPS NRP Annual ReportThe Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Naval Research Program (NRP) is funded by the Chief of Naval Operations and supports research projects for the Navy and Marine Corps. The NPS NRP serves as a launch-point for new initiatives which posture naval forces to meet current and future operational warfighter challenges. NRP research projects are led by individual research teams that conduct research and through which NPS expertise is developed and maintained. The primary mechanism for obtaining NPS NRP support is through participation at NPS Naval Research Working Group (NRWG) meetings that bring together fleet topic sponsors, NPS faculty members, and students to discuss potential research topics and initiatives.Chief of Naval Operations (CNO)This research is supported by funding from the Naval Postgraduate School, Naval Research Program (PE 0605853N/2098). https://nps.edu/nrpChief of Naval Operations (CNO)Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.

Formalising trust as a computational concept

Trust is a judgement of unquestionable utility - as humans we use it every day of our lives. However, trust has suffered from an imperfect understanding, a plethora of definitions, and informal use in the literature and in everyday life. It is common to say "I trust you, " but what does that mean? This thesis provides a clarification of trust. We present a formalism for trust which provides us with a tool for precise discussion. The formalism is implementable: it can be embedded in an artificial agent, enabling the agent to make trust-based decisions. Its applicability in the domain of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) is raised. The thesis presents a testbed populated by simple trusting agents which substantiates the utility of the formalism. The formalism provides a step in the direction of a proper understanding and definition of human trust. A contribution of the thesis is its detailed exploration of the possibilities of future work in the area

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Production Systems and Logistics (CPSL 2021)

Proceedings of the CPSL 202