39,890 research outputs found
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
Automating decision making to help establish norm-based regulations
Norms have been extensively proposed as coordination mechanisms for both
agent and human societies. Nevertheless, choosing the norms to regulate a
society is by no means straightforward. The reasons are twofold. First, the
norms to choose from may not be independent (i.e, they can be related to each
other). Second, different preference criteria may be applied when choosing the
norms to enact. This paper advances the state of the art by modeling a series
of decision-making problems that regulation authorities confront when choosing
the policies to establish. In order to do so, we first identify three different
norm relationships -namely, generalisation, exclusivity, and substitutability-
and we then consider norm representation power, cost, and associated moral
values as alternative preference criteria. Thereafter, we show that the
decision-making problems faced by policy makers can be encoded as linear
programs, and hence solved with the aid of state-of-the-art solvers
A canonical theory of dynamic decision-making
Decision-making behavior is studied in many very different fields, from medicine and eco- nomics to psychology and neuroscience, with major contributions from mathematics and statistics, computer science, AI, and other technical disciplines. However the conceptual- ization of what decision-making is and methods for studying it vary greatly and this has resulted in fragmentation of the field. A theory that can accommodate various perspectives may facilitate interdisciplinary working. We present such a theory in which decision-making is articulated as a set of canonical functions that are sufficiently general to accommodate diverse viewpoints, yet sufficiently precise that they can be instantiated in different ways for specific theoretical or practical purposes. The canons cover the whole decision cycle, from the framing of a decision based on the goals, beliefs, and background knowledge of the decision-maker to the formulation of decision options, establishing preferences over them, and making commitments. Commitments can lead to the initiation of new decisions and any step in the cycle can incorporate reasoning about previous decisions and the rationales for them, and lead to revising or abandoning existing commitments. The theory situates decision-making with respect to other high-level cognitive capabilities like problem solving, planning, and collaborative decision-making. The canonical approach is assessed in three domains: cognitive and neuropsychology, artificial intelligence, and decision engineering
OperA/ALIVE/OperettA
Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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
Preference purification and the inner rational agent:A critique of the conventional wisdom of behavioural welfare economics
Neoclassical economics assumes that individuals have stable and context-independent preferences, and uses preference-satisfaction as a normative criterion. By calling this assumption into question, behavioural findings cause fundamental problems for normative economics. A common response to these problems is to treat deviations from conventional rational-choice theory as mistakes, and to try to reconstruct the preferences that individuals would have acted on, had they reasoned correctly. We argue that this preference purification approach implicitly uses a dualistic model of the human being, in which an inner rational agent is trapped in an outer psychological shell. This model is psychologically and philosophically problematic
Industrial Symbiotic Networks as Coordinated Games
We present an approach for implementing a specific form of collaborative
industrial practices-called Industrial Symbiotic Networks (ISNs)-as MC-Net
cooperative games and address the so called ISN implementation problem. This
is, the characteristics of ISNs may lead to inapplicability of fair and stable
benefit allocation methods even if the collaboration is a collectively desired
one. Inspired by realistic ISN scenarios and the literature on normative
multi-agent systems, we consider regulations and normative socioeconomic
policies as two elements that in combination with ISN games resolve the
situation and result in the concept of coordinated ISNs.Comment: 3 pages, Proc. of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous
Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2018
Extend Commitment Protocols with Temporal Regulations: Why and How
The proposal of Elisa Marengo's thesis is to extend commitment protocols to
explicitly account for temporal regulations. This extension will satisfy two
needs: (1) it will allow representing, in a flexible and modular way, temporal
regulations with a normative force, posed on the interaction, so as to
represent conventions, laws and suchlike; (2) it will allow committing to
complex conditions, which describe not only what will be achieved but to some
extent also how. These two aspects will be deeply investigated in the proposal
of a unified framework, which is part of the ongoing work and will be included
in the thesis.Comment: Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium and Poster Session of the 5th
International Symposium on Rules (RuleML 2011@IJCAI), pages 1-8
(arXiv:1107.1686
- …