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

Web Surveys (Version 2.0)

This contribution addresses fundamental methodological problems facing online surveys, especially the coverage problem and sample-selection issues. The use of online panels based on random samples is seen as a possible solution

Directed deadline obligations in agent-based business contracts

There are B2B relationships that presume cooperation in contract enactment. This issue should be taken into account when modeling, for computational handling, contractual commitments through obligations. Deadline obligations have been modeled by considering that reaching the deadline without compliance brings up a violation. When modeling commitments in business contracts, directed obligations have been studied for identifying two agents: the obligation's bearer and the counterparty, who may claim for legal action in case of non-compliance. We argue in favor of a directed deadline obligation approach, taking inspiration on international legislation over trade procedures. Our proposal to model contractual obligations is based on authorizations granted in specific states of an obligation lifecycle model, which we formalize using temporal logic and implement in a rule-based system. The performance of a contractual relationship is supported by a model of flexible deadlines, which allow for further cooperation between autonomous agents. As a result, the decision-making space of agents concerning contractual obligations is enlarged and becomes richer. We discuss the issues that agents should take into account in this extended setting

Ontological aspects of the implementation of norms in agent-based electronic institutions

Abstract In order to regulate different circumstances over an extensive period of time, norms in institutions are stated in a vague and often ambiguous manner, thereby abstracting from concrete aspects, which are relevant for the operationalisation of institutions. If agent-based electronic institutions, which adhere to a set of abstract requirements, are to be built, how can those requirements be translated into more concrete constraints, the impact of which can be described directly in the institution? We address this issue considering institutions as normative systems based on articulate ontologies of the agent domain they regulate. Ontologies, we hold, are used by institutions to relate the abstract concepts in which their norms are formulated, to their concrete application domain. In this view, different institutions can implement the same set of norms in different ways as far as they presuppose divergent ontologies of the concepts in which that set of norms is formulated. In this paper we analyse this phenomenon introducing a notion of contextual ontology. We will focus on the formal machinery necessary to characterise it as well.

Towards an Institutional Environment using Norms for Contract Performance

Abstract. A strong research emphasis is being given towards regulating interoperable multi-agent environments through norms and institutions. We are concerned with environments in which agents form together virtual organizations leading to cooperation agreements that can be enforced. An electronic institution provides a coordination framework facilitating automatic contract establishment and providing an enforceable normative environment. We introduce the notion of contextualized norms within our institutional framework, and develop on a model of institutional reality, taking into account institutional roles and agents ’ statements, with the aim of providing a contract monitoring service. Our proposal describes how to use norms to formalize cooperation agreements and operational contracts, and how to monitor and detect contract violations.

Personal data privacy semantics in multi-agent systems interactions

In recent years, we have witnessed the growth of applications relying on the use and processing of personal data, especially in the health and well-being domains. Users themselves produce these data (e.g., through self-reported data acquisition, or personal devices such as smartphones, smartwatches or other wearables). A key challenge in this context is to guarantee the protection of personal data privacy, respecting the rights of users for deciding about data reuse, consent to data processing and storage, anonymity conditions, or the right to withhold or delete personal data. With the enforcement of recent regulations in this domain, such as the GDPR, applications are required to guarantee compliance, challenging current practices for personal data management. In this paper, we address this problem in the context of decentralized personal data applications, which may need to interact and negotiate conditions of data processing and reuse. Following a distributed paradigm without a top-down organization, we propose an agent-based model in which personal data providers and data consumers are embedded into privacy-aware agents capable of negotiating and coordinating data reuse, consent, and policies, using semantic vocabularies for privacy and provenance