Institutional Reality and Norms: Specifying and Monitoring Agent Organizations

Abstract

Norms and institutions have been proposed to regulate multi-agent interactions. However, agents are intrinsically autonomous, and may thus decide whether to comply with norms. On the other hand, besides institutional norms, agents may adopt new norms by establishing commitments with other agents. In this paper, we address these issues by considering an electronic institution that monitors the compliance to norms in an evolving normative framework: norms are used both to regulate an existing environment and to define contracts that make agents' commitments explicit. In particular, we consider the creation of virtual organizations in which agents commit to certain cooperation efforts regulated by appropriate norms. The supervision of norm fulfillment is based on the notion of institutional reality, which is constructed by assigning powers to agents enacting institutional roles. Constitutive rules make a connection between the illocutions of those agents and institutional facts, certifying the occurrence of associated external transactions. Contract specification is based on conditional prescription of obligations. Contract monitoring relies on rules for detecting the fulfillment and violation of those obligations. The implementation of our normative institutional environment is supported by a rule-based inference engine.

Resource-bounded Norm Monitoring In Multi-agent Systems

“…All these application areas could benefit from having advanced algorithms for run-time norm monitoring. In particular, the existing solutions (Cardoso & Oliveira, 2007;Criado et al, 2013;Gaertner et al, 2007;Meneguzzi et al, 2012;Modgil et al, 2009;Leucker & Schallhart, 2009) for norm monitoring are ineffective for these application domains due to the inherent incompleteness of observations; e.g., network monitoring tools have limited resources to obtain information about the network, cannot monitor all events in the system and can be partially evaded by hackers. Even those solutions that try to overcome the partial observability problem cannot be applied to these domains as monitoring tools should be able to operate in real-time with limited resources and the policies cannot be modified, which entails that solutions ignoring norm monitoring costs Basin et al, 2012), solutions proposing to increase the monitoring resources (Bulling et al, 2013), and solutions proposing the adaptation of norms to what is observable (Alechina et al, 2014;Joshi et al, 2017) are all unsuitable for sociotechnical systems.…”

“…Most of the existing proposals on practical norm enforcement (Esteva, Rosell, Rodríguez-Aguilar, & Arcos, 2004;Cardoso & Oliveira, 2007;Criado, Argente, Noriega, & Botti, 2013;Vasconcelos, García-Camino, Gaertner, Rodríguez-Aguilar, & Noriega, 2012;Gaertner, GarciaCamino, Noriega, Rodriguez-Aguilar, & Vasconcelos, 2007) assume that monitors have unlimited resources to observe the actions performed by agents and the environment. In that case, checking norm compliance is easy as monitors have complete information about norm violations and fulfilments.…”

Lietuvos organizacijų normų analizė

“…Taigi nagrinėjant organizacijų normas šiame darbe labiausiai tinkamas ir talpiausias apibrėžimas yra: normospripažintos privalomos taisyklės (Cardoso, Oliveira, 2007). Normos yra kolektyvinis konstruktas ir rodo, dėl ko organizacijoje susitarta (Gelfand ir kt., 2011).…”

A Context-Based Institutional Normative Environment

“…The normative state concerns the description of what is taken for granted in a model of so-called institutional reality [5]. Therefore, we call every formula in NS an institutional reality element, or IRE .…”