The Axiomatisation of Socio-Economic Principles for Self-Organising Systems

Abstract

Abstract-We are interested in engineering for open, embedded and resource-constrained systems, which have applications in ad hoc, sensor and opportunistic networks. In such systems, there is decentralised control, competition for resources and an expectation of both intentional and unintentional errors. The 'optimal' distribution of resources is then less important than the 'robustness' or 'survivability' of the distribution mechanism, based on collective decision-making and tolerance of unintentional errors. We therefore seek to model resource allocation in the network as a common pool resource management problem, and apply a formal characterisation of Ostrom's socio-economic principles for building enduring institutions. This paper presents a complete axiomatisation in the Event Calculus of six of Ostrom's eight principles, describes a preliminary testbed for experimenting with the axiomatisation, and considers the work from a methodological perspective of sociologically-inspired computing for self-organising systems.

Socially-Sensitive Systems Design: Exploring Social Potential

“…This can be seen as instance of the more general methodology of value-sensitive design [16] [17], a methodology for engineering socio-technical systems which promotes human values as "supra-functional requirements". Further examples of this can be seen in what could be considered as, effectively, sustainability by design , in systems which try to encapsulate Ostrom's design principles for self-governing institutions which support sustainable common-pool resource management [32] through an axiomatisation in (executable) computational logic.…”

Normative Control: Controlling Open Distributed Systems with Autonomous Entities

“…Ostrom's eight principles constitute conditions for overcoming the tragedy. The principles are as follows (see [8] When considering open distributed systems, we aim to implement organisations which follow those principles as shown in the next section.…”

“…She presented eight design principles for successful self-management of decentralised institutions. Pitt et al [8] adapted these to Normative Multi-Agent Systems (see Sect. 4.2.3 above in this chapter).…”

“…Afterwards, a control mechanism decides about interventions that make use of sanctioning and incentive techniques to motivate the agents to adapt their behaviour. Such a concept based on sanctions and incentives to guide self-organised system behaviour implements a version of "normative control" [8].…”

The open agent society: retrospective and prospective views

“…In Pitt et al (2012), it was shown how the framework of dynamic norm-governed systems could be used to axiomatise Ostrom's institutional design principles in computational logic using the Event Calculs (cf. Sect.…”