Legal and ethical implications of applications based on agreement technologies: the case of auction-based road intersections

Abstract

Agreement Technologies refer to a novel paradigm for the construction of distributed intelligent systems, where autonomous software agents negotiate to reach agreements on behalf of their human users. Smart Cities are a key application domain for Agreement Technologies. While several proofs of concept and prototypes exist, such systems are still far from ready for being deployed in the real-world. In this paper we focus on a novel method for managing elements of smart road infrastructures of the future, namely the case of auction-based road intersections. We show that, even though the key technological elements for such methods are already available, there are multiple non-technical issues that need to be tackled before they can be applied in practice. For this purpose, we analyse legal and ethical implications of auction-based road intersections in the context of international regulations and from the standpoint of the Spanish legislation. From this exercise, we extract a set of required modifications, of both technical and legal nature, which need to be addressed so as to pave the way for the potential real-world deployment of such systems in a future that may not be too far away.

Streamlining advanced taxi assignment strategies based on legal analysis

“…However, in practice, legal implications are often considered only once a protype has already been built. As outlined in [9], in such cases a semi-formal specification of system behaviour is often sufficient to perform a legal analysis that examines compatibility with a legal framework and reveals options for adjusting a prototype accordingly.…”

“…We aim at a description of system operation that is easily understandable by legal experts, hiding away pure technical details. For this purpose, for each of the high-level concepts put forward in [9], we provide a textual description for the application sketched in the previous subsection. The result is shown in Table 1.…”

“…As [8] outlines, especially novel applications based on AT have a wide range of legal question and problems, which must be addressed if such systems are ever meant to be applied to the real world. In [9], we argued that the implications of such a legal analysis are twofold: on the one hand, it identifies as to how far clarifications or changes of legal regulations would be required; on the other hand, it provides further insights into modifications needed in the smart platform itself.…”

“…Section 2 briefly summarises related work, focusing especially on existing approaches related to an advanced and potentially collaborative management of taxi fleets. In section 3, after briefly summarising the taxi assignment approach presented in [10], we apply the steps proposed in [9] to analyse this approach, and obtain a high-level description of system operation suitable for analysis by legal experts. In section 4, we examine the different operational principals with regard to their legal compliance, in order to flesh out potential problems and identify options to overcome them, both from a technical and from a regulatory perspective.…”