Classifying sanctions and designing a conceptual sanctioning process model for socio-technical systems

Abstract

We understand a socio-technical system (STS) as a cyber-physical system in which two or more autonomous parties interact via or about technical elements, including the parties’ resources and actions. As information technology begins to pervade every corner of human life, STSs are becoming ever more common, and the challenge of governing STSs is becoming increasingly important. We advocate a normative basis for governance, wherein norms represent the standards of correct behaviour that each party in an STS expects from others. A major benefit of focussing on norms is that they provide a socially realistic view of interaction among autonomous parties that abstracts low-level implementation details. Overlaid on norms is the notion of a sanction as a negative or positive reaction to potentially any violation of or compliance with an expectation. Although norms have been well studied as regards governance for STSs, sanctions have not. Our understanding and usage of norms is inadequate for the purposes of governance unless we incorporate a comprehensive representation of sanctions.We address the aforementioned gap by proposing (i) a sanction typology that reflects the relevant features of sanctions, and (ii) a conceptual sanctioning process model providing a functional structure for sanctioning in STS. We demonstrate our contributions via a motivating scenario from the domain of renewable energy trading.

Comodo : Collaborative monitoring of commitment delegations

“…We do not deal with design issues here, but as a future work it would be interesting to study the application of the improper delegation notion in contexts other than monitoring, or monitoring in the planning domain (Soeanu et al, 2016). Moreover, extending commitments with sanctions (Nardin et al, 2016) would add another dimension to COMODO's delegation monitoring procedure. Sanctions provide compensation for commitment violations, therefore act as deterrence against violating commitments.…”

Guest Editors’ Introduction

“…standard of interaction to which each user is held (Kafalı and Singh 2017), which no purely technical solution can establish. Enforcement of sanctions (Nardin et al 2016) would enhance such accountability by providing compensation for norm violations and acting as deterrence against violating norms. Normative models can be helpful even in domains where norms are unknown a priori.…”

GAVEL: a sanction-based regulation mechanism for normative multiagent systems

“…The main objective of this work is to create a sanctioning enforcement framework, named GAVEL, which addresses the requirements identified by Nardin (2015) in order to endow agents with sanction reasoning and decision capabilities. More specifically, this work intends to: a) Refine and operationalise the conceptual sanctioning process model proposed by Nardin et al (2016); b) Demonstrate how GAVEL may be used in a social dilemma when sanctions with different categories and strength may be applied in response to a norm compliance or violation.…”

“…No entanto, a maioria dos mecanismos de regulação encontrados na literatura não provêem suporte para associação de diferentes categorias e valores de sanções ao cumprimento e violação de normas, portanto abstendo agentes da capacidade de raciocinar e decidir sobre sanções. Uma exceção é o modelo proposto por Nardin et al (2016). Baseado neste último, esta dissertação apresenta um arcabouço operacional de aplicação de sanções, denominado GAVEL, que habilita agentes a decidir por sanções mais apropriadas a serem aplicadas com base em fatores contextuais de decisão.…”