flexible behaviour regulation in agent based systems
Cooperation is the fundamental underpinning of multi-agent systems, allowing agents to interact to achieve their goals. However, agents must manage the risk associated with interacting with others who have different objectives, or who may fail to fulfill their commitments. There are many ways in which such a desirable social order may be encouraged or even mandated. For example, trust oers a mechanism for modeling and reasoning about reliability, honesty, etc., while organisations and norms provide a framework within which to apply them, and motivations provide a means for representing and reasoning about overall objectives. In this talk, I will consider the role of trust, organisations and norms in a motivation-based view of agency that seeks to regulate behaviour, and will illustrate some of these issues with aspects of several projects, including the CONTRACT project, concerned with contract-based electronic business systems. Finally, I will also seek to identify some key themes entwining these notions of behaviour regulation with autonomic computing.
behaviour regulation organisations norms multiagent systems