Group Norms for Multi-Agent Organisations

W. W. Vasconcelos acknowledges the support of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC-UK) within the research project “Scrutable Autonomous Systems” (Grant No. EP/J012084/1). The authors thank the three anonymous reviewers for their comments, suggestions, and constructive criticisms. Thanks are due to Dr. Nir Oren, for comments on earlier versions of the article, and Mr. Seumas Simpson, for proofreading the manuscript. Any remaining mistakes are the sole responsibility of the authors.Peer reviewedPostprin

The Duality of Technology: ICT as an enabler and inhibiter in Business Process improvement

The improvement of business processes often depends on ICT, which can either facilitate or impede improvements. Yet it is not clear though to what extent ICT enables or inhibits business process improvement and what factors can explain this effect. Orlikowski’s duality of technology underscores the socio-historical context of technology and the dual nature of technology, as objective reality and as socially constructed product. In this article the duality of technology is used as the theoretical lens to analyze the interaction between ICT and business improvement using two case studies. Factors show the duality of technology by having an enabling or inhibiting effect depending on the situation. Some factors were found that can have either an enabling or inhibiting effect and this effect was found to be dependent on the context. This stresses the need for situational-specific understanding and taking into account the context

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

Application Domains

The subject of this chapter is the application of models for social coordination (M4SC). Deriving from and extending multiagent systems (MAS), applications of M4SC inherit the attributes of MAS, such as multiple actors, distribution, and heterogeneity, but bring characteristics of their own that are essential to social coordination over and above conventional MAS. In this chapter, we first discuss these differentiating properties of M4SC, identifying essential and non essential (but commonly occurring) characteristics. This we follow with a wideranging (but not exhaustive or exclusive) discussion of classes of M4SC applications, which are supported by structured, illustrative summaries of noteworthy examples of applications, created using the frameworks described elsewhere in this volume. Finally, we give an overview of a broader range applications developed with the frameworks, with links to further reading.Peer Reviewe

Values in Design Methodologies for AI

Addressing and integrating human values into AI design and development processes in research and practice can be di cult, and a clear methodological approach can clarify issues of both theory and prac- tice. One such approach is Value Sensitive Design (VSD), an established theory for addressing issues of values in a systematic and principled fash- ion in the design of information technology. However, it is unclear how VSD is translated into current design practices and whether it has been integrated into existing methodologies. In this paper, we investigated whether and to what extent VSD has passed down into design method- ologies used in practice. We found that the actual application of VSD in methodologies is limited, but that in the last few years, steps have been taken to bridge the gap between theory and practice