Automated multi-level governance compliance checking

Abstract

An institution typically comprises constitutive rules, which give shape and meaning to social interactions and regulative rules, which prescribe agent behaviour in the society. Regulative rules guide social interaction, in particular when they are coupled with reward and punishment regulations that are enforced for (non-)compliance. Institution examples include legislation and contracts. Formal institutional reasoning frameworks automate ascribing social meaning to agent interaction and determining whether those actions have social meanings that comprise (non-)compliant behaviour. Yet, institutions do not just govern societies. Rather, in what is called multi-level governance, institutional designs at lower governance levels (e.g., national legislation at the national level) are governed by higher level institutions (e.g., directives, human rights charters and supranational agreements). When an institution design is found to be non-compliant, punishments can be issued by annulling the legislation or imposing fines on the responsible designers (i.e., government). In order to enforce multi-level governance, higher governance levels (e.g., courts applying human rights) must check lower level institution designs (e.g., national legislation) for compliance; in order to avoid punishment, lower governance levels (e.g., national governments) must check their institution designs are compliant with higher-level institutions before enactment. However, checking non-compliance of institution designs in multi-level governance is non-trivial. In particular, because institutions in multi-level governance operate at different levels of abstraction. Lower level institutions govern with concrete regulations whilst higher level institutions typically comprise increasingly vague and abstract regulations. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a formal framework with a novel semantics that defines compliance between concrete lower level institutions and abstract higher level institutions. The formal framework is complemented by a sound and complete computational framework that automates compliance checking, which we apply to a real-world case study

On the cultivation of proper abstraction

“…We were also able to find evidence of the negative impact caused by inept abstraction in multi-agent enterprise environment [26]. This paper draws attention to the fact that those at different levels of management in a multi-level enterprise environment are guided by rules of different abstraction levels, which creates a correspondence problem, namely, rules are more vague and inaccurate at a high level, and requirements are specific at a low level.…”

“…Nevertheless, the understanding is gradually emerging today that abstraction is not only a technology problem where it can be difficult to return to a specific view of the subject. Along with papers [26,41], a tendency to combine an abstraction process with interpretation is already clearly manifesting itself. The paper [56] presents the "Model-with-Example" approach, which combines the modeling of abstract interaction with given visualization, which, according to the authors, increases the development efficiency.…”

A Norm Emergence Framework for Normative MAS -- Position Paper

“…Though norm conflicts would have been considered in discussions with other synthesizers, there may still be norm conflicts arising from external interaction. This can occur when the MAS may be itself governed by a higher level MAS [11] and the norms of this MAS must not conflict with the norms of the governing MAS. These conflicts, if they exist must be resolved, and this can be achieved utilising techniques similar to [11].…”

“…This can occur when the MAS may be itself governed by a higher level MAS [11] and the norms of this MAS must not conflict with the norms of the governing MAS. These conflicts, if they exist must be resolved, and this can be achieved utilising techniques similar to [11]. The stability of the normative system within the MAS must also be considered and should be incorporated into the final decision on the modification of the normative system.…”

Contestable Black Boxes

“…An appropriate language for this purpose needs sufficient expressiveness to model the relevant legal requirements and policies, while allowing for compliance with these requirements to be monitored and tracked. Many existing approaches to norm monitoring in the MAS literature take an enforcement point of view, in which a monitoring system is an observation mechanism, that can log norm violations provided it can access the relevant information [11,15]. This mechanism is particularly developed for scenarios where each participant and component of the system has a well-defined purpose (such as buyer or seller) with clear actions available for each role (such as buy, sell, negotiate, concede) and has been successfully applied in contexts like marketplaces [13].…”