Coordinating with obligations

Abstract

Organizations constrain the behavior of agents by imposing multiple, often contradictory, obligations and interdictions amongst them. To work in harmony, agents must find ways to satisfy these constraints, or to break less important ones when necessary. In this paper, we present a solution to this problem based on a representation of obligations and interdictions in an organizational framework, together with nn inference method that also decides which obligations to break in contradictory situations. These are integrated in an operational, practically useful agent development language that covers the spectrum from defining organizations, roles, agents, obligations, goals, conversations to inferring and exccuting coordinated agent behaviors in multi-agent applications, One strength of the approach is the way it supports negotiation by exchanging deontic constraints amongst agents, We illustrate this and the entire system with a negotiated solution to the feature interaction problem in the telecommunications industry and a work process coordination example for a manufacturing supply chain.

Agent communication and artificial institutions

“…In doing so, norms play an important function, in that when they are respected norms make an agent's behavior at least partially predictable and allow agents to coordinate and plan their actions according to the expected behavior of the others, as studied in [28,4]. We think that norms can also be used to specify protocols, because they can dictate that in certain circumstances an agent should not perform several kinds of communicative acts, it ought to send a given type of message or react to a message in a specific way.…”

Role-based collaboration and its kernel mechanisms

“…The proposed role-based collaboration and theory can gain significant applications in group decision support systems (GDS) [5], [32], [36], management [27], [34], personalized interfaces [12], [25], [28], [30], agent systems [2], [7], and software engineering [8], [20], [22], [26], [33].…”

“…It requires that everybody respects the social laws of the community [2]. Therefore, individuals fill specific positions and play specific roles in an organization.…”

“…The contributions of [29] and [30] demonstrate the importance of roles in a collaborative system. Some traditional computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) systems, or groupware, have indeed applied the concept of roles [2], [6], [10], [14], [18], [29], [30], [32]. However, these systems apply the role concept intuitively without defining it clearly and exactly.…”

Temporal reasoning: an application to normative systems

“…A solution to this problem, that has been proposed in the last years concerns the use of norms or social laws ( [21], [4], [3], [7]). A norm is mainly a syntactical description of an ideal behavior saying what an agent should do or not.…”