Instrumenting Multi Agent Organisations with Organisational Artifacts and Agents

Abstract

Reputation is often cited as an instrument to enforce norm compliance: agents that do not follow the norms have their reputation decreased. Conceiving reputation as a collective process, i.e. a kind of shared voices as proposed by Conte & Paolucci, is not a simple task. In this paper, we propose a first step in this direction by instrumenting multi-agent organisation with an artifact that publishes some objective evaluations of the performance of the agents with respect to their be- haviour within the organisation. The members of the organisation can then read these evaluations and build up their reputation of others. The artifact serves thus as an instrument that aid in the building of the rep- utation of the agents. We propose that the evaluation of the agents is not simply based on their obedience to norms, but also considers their pro-activeness and their contribution to the success of collective tasks that are being executed in the organisation. This proposal is detailed and exemplified in the context of the Moise+ organisational model sup- ported by a set of organisational artifacts as proposed in the ORA4MAS approach.

Highlights

We are thus considering two main mechanisms to implement norm in a MAS:2 – Regimentation is a mechanism that simply prevents the agents to perform actions that are forbidden by a norm. More precisely, we regiment some actions in order to preserve important features of the system (e.g. the access to the computers). – Enforcement is a mechanism which is applied after the detection of the violation of some norm. While regimentation is a preventive mechanism, enforcement is a reactive one. From the point of view of the agents, they may decide to obey or not the norm according to their local view of the organisation. From a system point of view, the fulfilled/unfulfilled of the norms should be detected, evaluated as a violation or not, and then judged as worth of sanction/reward or not.

3. The Moise+ Organisational Model and Its Artifacts

  • proposes an organisational modelling language that explic- itly decomposes the specification of organisation into structural, functional, and deontic dimensions

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