Commitments and interaction norms in organisations

Abstract

In an organisational setting such as an online marketplace, an entity called the 'organisation' or 'institution' defines interaction protocols, monitors agent interaction, and intervenes to enforce the interaction protocols. The organisation might be a software system that thus regulates the marketplace, for example. In this article we abstract over applicationspecific protocols and consider commitment lifecycles as generic interaction protocols. We model interaction protocols by explicitly-represented norms, such that we can operationalise the enforcement of protocols by means of norm enforcement, and we can analyse the protocols by a logical analysis of the norms. We adopt insights and methods from commitment-based approaches to agent interaction as well as from norm-based approaches to agent behaviour governance. First, we show how to use explicitly-represented norms to model commitment dynamics (lifecycles). Second, we introduce an operational semantics to operationalise norm enforcement. Third, we show how to logically analyse interaction protocols by means of commitment dynamics and norm enforcement. The model, semantics, and analysis are illustrated by a running example from a vehicle insurance domain. Keywords Commitments · Normative organisations · Operational semanticsThe foundations of the ideas developed in this article were presented at the COIN workshop at AAMAS'12 [34] and briefly summarized at the AAMAS'12 conference [33].

Norm-based and commitment-driven agentification of the Internet of Things

“…These latter support form a dynamic set of things that would temporarily cooperate to achieve some user goal [2]. This cooperation consists of analyzing a user goal's achievability given capabilities of things located within some specified geographical boundaries, supporting the negotiation with the available things so, that, a commitment-based emergent configuration is formed, and, finally, running IoT [11]. This framework models, first, a lifecycle as a set of interaction norms (defined as rules) and second, regulation policies as sanctions to apply when commitments are violated.…”

“…In our thing-agentification approach, we action (business/social) norms through (business/social) commitments. To ensure full compliance with norms at run-time, monitoring commitments is a must and should permit to detect satisfaction or violation of these commitments [11,37]. In fact, monitoring checks if a commitment's debtor has either executed 10 (i.e., satisfaction) or not (i.e., violation 11 ) the actions included in the commitment's content.…”

GoCo: planning expressive commitment protocols

“…(25)]. Second, note that a goal in the inactive (inactiveG) state is not exactly the same as the negation of the active state, instead, inactiveG is true if the goal is not null, neither of its failure or success conditions are true, and it is in neither of the terminal, suspended, and active states [Eq.…”

“…Of course, any party may represent a commitment internally but the meaning and significance of commitments derives from their relational nature. Over the years, there has been progress on structuring interactions in terms of commitment protocols [7,8,19,20,25,35,69]. Commitment protocols offer a noted advantage in that they enable participating agents to coordinate in a flexible manner, retaining their autonomy.…”

Towards Data- and Norm-Aware Multiagent Systems

“…[20], then shows how commitments lifecycle can be captured by a set of norms. It explains the advantages of this view which are: (1) enabling agents to take into account the evolution of commitments in their reasoning; (2) allowing the customization of the commitment lifecycle to the needs of particular application contexts.…”