Formal Property-Oriented Design of Voting Rules Using Composable Modules

Voting rules aggregate multiple individual preferences in order to make a collective decision. Commonly, these mechanisms are expected to respect a multitude of different notions of fairness and reliability, which must be carefully balanced to avoid inconsistencies. We present an approach for the sound and flexible design of voting rules from composable modules. Formal composition rules guarantee social choice properties from properties of the individual components. The approach can be applied to many voting rules from the literature

Voting And Lottery Technologies: A Potential Jackpot? An Economic Analysis

Voting irregularities and recount mechanisms used in Florida during the 2000 U.S. Presidential election have brought calls for re-vamped voting technologies and procedures. Many in both the public and private sectors have focused on the Internet as a possible underlying technology that could provide the ease, accuracy, and reliability a twenty-first century voting system should possess. Apart from the difficulties inherent in building an Internet based system from scratch, this solution ignores existing, proven technology, already in use by a majority of states, which could be adapted to provide a cost effective voting system with many desirable characteristics. The technology: computerized, “on-line” lottery systems. Inherently, these lotteries are transaction processing systems, which is what a voting system, at its base, is. Lottery systems are state based, handle vast quantities of transactions reliably, operate under an extremely high level of scrutiny, and are familiar to millions of Americans. This paper examines a lottery technology based voting system from several perspectives and develops an economic welfare analysis of a lottery technology based voting system

Verified Construction of Fair Voting Rules

Voting rules aggregate multiple individual preferences in order to make collective decisions. Commonly, these mechanisms are expected to respect a multitude of different fairness and reliability properties, e.g., to ensure that each voter\u27s ballot accounts for the same proportion of the elected alternatives, or that a voter cannot change the election outcome in her favor by insincerely filling out her ballot. However, no voting rule is fair in all respects, and trade-off attempts between such properties often bring out inconsistencies, which makes the construction of arguably practical and fair voting rules non-trivial and error-prone. In this paper, we present a formal and systematic approach for the flexible and verified construction of voting rules from composable core modules to respect such properties by construction. Formal composition rules guarantee resulting properties from properties of the individual components, which are of generic nature to be reused for various voting rules. We provide a prototypical logic-based implementation with proofs for a selected set of structures and composition rules within the theorem prover Isabelle/HOL. The approach can be readily extended in order to support many voting rules from the literature by extending the set of basic modules and composition rules. We exemplarily construct the well-known voting rule sequential majority comparison (SMC) from simple generic modules, and automatically produce a formal proof that SMC satisfies the fairness property monotonicity. Monotonicity is a well-known social-choice property that is easily violated by voting rules in practice

A Primer on Architectural Level Fault Tolerance

This paper introduces the fundamental concepts of fault tolerant computing. Key topics covered are voting, fault detection, clock synchronization, Byzantine Agreement, diagnosis, and reliability analysis. Low level mechanisms such as Hamming codes or low level communications protocols are not covered. The paper is tutorial in nature and does not cover any topic in detail. The focus is on rationale and approach rather than detailed exposition

Fault tolerant architectures for integrated aircraft electronics systems

Work into possible architectures for future flight control computer systems is described. Ada for Fault-Tolerant Systems, the NETS Network Error-Tolerant System architecture, and voting in asynchronous systems are covered

Cooperative Learning Model based on Multi-Agent Architecture for Embedded Intelligent Systems

Cooperative systems are suitable for many types of applications and nowadays these system are vastly used to improve a previously defined system or to coordinate multiple devices working together. This paper provides an alternative to improve the reliability of a previous intelligent identification system. The proposed approach implements a cooperative model based on multi-agent architecture. This new system is composed of several radar-based systems which identify a detected object and transmit its own partial result by implementing several agents and by using a wireless network to transfer data. The proposed topology is a centralized architecture where the coordinator device is in charge of providing the final identification result depending on the group behavior. In order to find the final outcome, three different mechanisms are introduced. The simplest one is based on majority voting whereas the others use two different weighting voting procedures, both providing the system with learning capabilities. Using an appropriate network configuration, the success rate can be improved from the initial 80% up to more than 90%