Establishing Global Properties of Multi-Agent Systems Via Local Laws

Zhang, Wenxuan; Serban, Constantin; Minsky, Naftaly H.

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-71103-2_10

Cited by 15 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…An approach supported by automated reasoning tools is the well-known work of Minsky and colleagues on 'Law-Governed Interaction' (LGI) [44,48,85,46]. LGI is an abstract regulatory mechanism that satisfies the following principles: statefulness, that is, the regulatory mechanism is sensitive to the history of interaction between the regulated components, decentralisation, for scalability, and generality, that is, LGI is not biased to a particular type of law.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Executable specification of open multi-agent systems

Artikis

Sergot

2009

Logic Journal of IGPL

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Abstract. Multi-agent systems where the agents are developed by parties with competing interests, and where there is no access to an agent's internal state, are often classified as 'open'. The members of such systems may inadvertently fail to, or even deliberately choose not to, conform to the system specification. Consequently, it is necessary to specify the normative relations that may exist between the members, such as permission, obligation, and institutional power. We present a framework being developed for executable specification of open multi-agent systems. We adopt a bird's eye view of these systems, as opposed to an agent's perspective whereby it reasons about how it should act. This paper is devoted to the presentation of various examples from the NetBill protocol formalised in terms of institutional power, permission and obligation. We express the system specification in the Event Calculus and execute the specification by means of a logic programming implementation. We also give several example formalisations of sanctions for dealing with violations of permissions and obligations. We distinguish between an open multi-agent system and the procedure by which an agent enters and leaves the system. We present examples from the specification of a role-management protocol for NetBill, and demonstrate the interplay between such a protocol and the corresponding multi-agent system.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It has been argued that many practical applications in the future will be realised in terms of open MAS. Not surprisingly, there is a growing interest in the MAS community in these systems ( [76,54,84,69,71,85,17] are but a few examples). Rosenschein and Zlotkin give the following description of this type of MAS:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Executable specification of open multi-agent systems

Artikis

Sergot

2009

Logic Journal of IGPL

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“…And as long as such orders constitute a small fraction of the total volume of interactions among members of C, such partial centralization is not likely to degrade substantially the efficiency and the scalability of the community in question. There are, of course, other properties that require aggregation-such as the maintenance of unique naming, which Journal of Software Engineering and Applications we have implemented in [13]. But our experience with LGI suggests that the implementation of most useful aggregate properties have only a marginal effect on the efficiently and scalability of a community.…”

Section: On the Expressive Power Of The Local Lgi Laws And On Their mentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Dependability of Highly Heterogeneous and Open Distributed Systems

Minsky¹

2018

JSEA

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This paper introduces an architecture of distributed systems that facilitates the implementation of a substantial range of dependable system properties, i.e.,properties that span an entire system, or a set of components dispersed throughout it. This architecture, called GDS, for governed distributed system, governs the system by controlling the flow of messages between its actors, independently of the internals of the interacting actors. This governance is done via an enforced collection of interaction laws organized into a modular and conflict free hierarchical ensemble. This ensemble of laws is sensitive to the history of interaction; and it is enforced in a decentralized manner, and is thus scalable. The dependable system properties that can be implemented under GDS can have the following beneficial consequences, among others: a) the ability to establish regularities over the system, rendering it more coherent, and easier to reason about; b) the ability to provide a degree of trust among the disparate actor of the system; and c) the ability to ensure compliance with interaction protocols that are essential for distributed computing. Consequently, the GDS architecture can have a significant impact on the following important system qualities: security, fault tolerance, auditability, and manageability.

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“…(Unfortunately, space limitation does not permit even an example of how this is done, but see [33] for such an example).…”

Section: Any Non-local Constraint On Interaction That Can Be Implemenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decentralized Governance of Distributed Systems via Interaction Control

Minsky

2012

Logic Programs, Norms and Action

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Abstract. This paper introduces an abstract reference model, called interaction control (IC), for the governance of large and heterogeneous distributed systems. This model goes well beyond conventional access control, along a number of dimensions. In particular, the IC model has the following characteristics: (1) it is inherently decentralized, and thus scalable even for a wide range of stateful policies; (2) it is very general, and not biased toward any particular type of policies; thus providing a significant realization of the age-old principle of separation of policy from mechanism; and (3) it enables flexible, composition-free, interoperability between different policies. The IC model, which is an abstraction of a mechanism called law-governed interaction (LGI), has been designed as a minimalist reference model that can be reified into a whole family of potential control mechanisms that may support different types of communication, with different performance requirements and for different application domains.

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Establishing Global Properties of Multi-Agent Systems Via Local Laws

Cited by 15 publications

References 10 publications

Executable specification of open multi-agent systems

Executable specification of open multi-agent systems

On the Dependability of Highly Heterogeneous and Open Distributed Systems

Decentralized Governance of Distributed Systems via Interaction Control

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