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Supervised interaction is concerned with the problem of establishing trust between contracting agents in electronic markets. It is designed to put safeguards in place that ensure that errant behaviour in business transactions is either prevented or sanctioned. Supervised Interaction consists of three elements: an organisational framework, a contrac...
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This is the final report on the work done under contract DASG-60-92-C-0055 from Phillips Labs and ARPA to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. The work started 04/28/92. The goal of this project was to create an environment for development and deployment of critical applications with hard real-time constraints in a reac...
Supervised interaction is concerned with the problem of establishing trust between contracting agents in electronic markets. Agents act as representatives of their organisations or of individuals, negotiate contracts for the supply of goods and services and manage their delivery. It is essential for the automation of business transactions to put sa...
Multi-party interaction scenarios usually involve interaction and collaboration between multiple participants, such as business negotiation, teamwork, etc. In multi-party interaction scenarios, trust mechanisms are needed to ensure the use of rights and the fulfillment of obligations. The use of blockchain and smart contracts to establish a decentr...
Although the concepts of relational and contractual governance in inter-organizational relationships have attracted academic and practitioner interest over the last decades, to date there have been limited comprehensive and systematic efforts to review, analyse and synthesise extant literature. We review and analyse 1,415 publications identified fr...
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... This research does not involve trust with internal characteristics, e.g. mental states of goals and interests (Falcone & Castelfranchi, 2001;Castelfranchi & Falcone, 2010), or trust involving security, organisational protocol or platforms as seen in Kollingbaum and Norman (2003); Huynh et al. (2006a);Hermoso, Billhardt and Ossowski (2010), or trust of information sources (Huynh et al., 2006a;Jiang & Bai, 2013a;Fang et al., 2012). This means that trust between humans and agents is not in the scope of this research. ...
In Multi-agent Systems, there are complex problems that cannot be solved by a single agent. Therefore, agent groups are formed to deal with the problems more effectively. These groups can have various types, structures, and complex behaviours. Meanwhile, the openness characteristic of multi-agent systems frequently introduces uncertainty into the environments. In such situations, it is hard or impossible to establish trust between agents and it can greatly affect the operation in the systems. Several trust models have been proposed to assist agents to make decisions during moments of uncertainty. Nevertheless, most of the existing works focus on trust evaluation for individual agents. Since complex agent groups are becoming ubiquitous in agent societies, these trust models have been exposing several shortcomings in addressing different aspects of trust in agent groups. This includes the highly dynamic and complex behaviours of them. Therefore, it is necessary to have a comprehensive trust management mechanism regarding these groups.
To this end, my thesis presents a trust management stack which consists of three components, i.e., CoTrust, DBATE, and GEM. The three components manage trust in agent groups in three stages, i.e., group formation, group performance, and group disbandment. The following contributions have been made.
It provides an efficient trust establishment method regarding group formation: CoTrust is a trust establishment method devised to address the lack of effective trust mechanism in group formation. It includes a protocol and a preference reasoning method that helps agents to improve the success rate of cooperation requests and also the satisfaction of the cooperation.
It enhances the robustness of existing trust/reputation systems in MASs: GEM is a group evidence management method to address the inconsistency of evidence generated by the rating convention when the systems consist of agent groups. GEM provides an efficient rating distribution method for group members. By using an evidence-based approach, GEM can not only guarantee the fairness of the distribution but can also significantly improve the robustness of reputation systems.
It enables agent group trust evaluation in MASs: DBATE is a trust evaluation method which aims to address shortcomings of current trust evaluation models targeting ad-hoc groups. The approach combines the power of the dynamic Bayesian network and contextual information for improving the accuracy of the evaluation. All of the proposed methods come with empirical analyses to confirm their effectiveness.
... To this aim, we choose to express the different SLOs of the initial SLA with obligation norms associated to involved agents of the architecture to benefit from the information added by more complex rules. To express SLO with normative obligations, we refer to the work of Kollingbaum [18,19] about supervised interaction. Each SLO of the SLA contracted between the provider and the client is expressed with the NoA language [18] interpretable by all agents of the architecture. ...
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used in Service- Oriented Computing to define the obligations of the parties involved
in a transaction. SLAs define these obligations, including for instance the expected service levels to be delivered by the
provider, and the payment expected from the client. The obligations of the parties must be made explicit prior to the transaction,
and a mechanism should be available to control the interaction, in order to ensure that the obligations are met. We outline
a norm-oriented multiagent system (NoMAS) architecture that is combined with the service-oriented architecture in order to
support the definition, management, and control of SLAs between the service clients and service providers.
... Par rapport aux différentes formes de contrat sur les objets, composants, services les contrats sur les agents sont ceux qui, sans doute, se rapprochent le plus de ceux de la vie quotidienne. Leurs formalisations réifient les acteurs du contrat et les clauses, en donnant à ces dernières une sémantique déontique d'obligation, permission etc. Par ailleurs, on peut noter que certaines distinguent et intègrent les contraintes sur les états du système de celles sur les actions des acteurs [59], [10]. Plusieurs explicitent aussi le cycle de vie du contrat. ...
... Plusieurs explicitent aussi le cycle de vie du contrat. Ainsi la durée d'application d'une clause est décrite dans [59], tandis que la composition même du contrat peut changer au cours du temps dans [28]. D'autres travaux expriment la différence entre violation de contrat et exception ou incorrection informatique [40]. ...
To meet the new requirements of applications in terms of flexibility and modularity and upgradability as well as distribution, the components and services paradigms have been used in well known frameworks such as J2EE, OSGI, SCA or Fractal. However, these don't offer tools for reasonning in a generic way on their architectural configuration and the specifications of their parts. In this thesis, I consider the organization of the verification of assemblies, and the diagnosis of their failures, from the point of view of a contractual, responsibility driven, approach. To this end, I analyze firstly the assumptions under which integrating various formalisms in this approach, then how to apply this approach to different architectures. Moreover, I study how people, intervening in the implementation of these systems, may take advantage of it. This leads me to present a contract model, which integrates and organizes various properties (analyzed as required for assembly dependability) jointly and uniformly on different kinds of architectures. I define an object model which reifies the contractual logic, and its implementation as a framework. This latter is validated on the Fractal component model and two contractual formalisms, one assertion-based and the other constraining interactions sequences between participants. A more advanced validation is shown on the exemple of an instant communities application.
... Special agents are needed for the formation of VO's. Their design must allow them to reason about their role within an organisation – what are their duties and privileges (the norms established within an organisation), how they are related to other agents and how their role determines their actions [16, 15]. A specific emphasis in VO research is the automated formation of Virtual Organisations by a set of software agents. ...
... We can also say that a Virtual Organisation is, in fact, described by such contract (or set of contracts). A way to design and describe an organisational structure is by designing contract templates [16]. These contract templates (held and issued by some normative authority) will then be used and instantiated to actually create a dynamically forming software system. ...
... The VO-manager holds a set of contract templates that are pre-specified and outline (a) a specific set of roles and (b) determine the rights, privileges and duties of agents recruited into such roles. A special VO-management protocol, called Supervised Interaction, was outlined in [16, 15]. Supervised Interaction proposes a specific management procedure that covers the selection of a specific contract template, the advertisement of roles and the recruitment of agents, the finalisation of a contract between these agents based on the contract template, and the execution of the Virtual Organisation . ...
The conventional ways of building software are accepted to produce rigid systems that impede the processes of change typical for contemporary organisations. In this paper, we propose that software can be made more adaptable and tuned to the needs of changing organisations, if it is built us-ing organisation-inspired principles and software structures such as Virtual Organisations, roles and norms. Agent-based software engineering is already using these principles, and we extend the state of the art in that domain by propos-ing an "open systems" approach, where agents can join and leave Virtual Organisations at will, taking on different roles as needed. Reasoning on organisational roles and norms is facilitated by formalised contract templates and automatic conflict resolution strategies. In terms of overall lifecycle, a system is initiated to satisfy a set of formalised requirements. Agents respond to bids for joining a Virtual Organisation, where each bid is for a contract-based coalition. In this pa-per, we describe our approach and outline a set of research challenges.
... In investigation of the issue of consistency in norm adoption, we first present the NoA practical reasoning architecture (see also [12]); an agent architecture designed for the management of contracts within agent mediated electronic commerce (details about important aspects such as contract management, trust and sanctioning of defective behaviour in the context of e-commerce is outlined in [11,13]). In section 2, both the NoA architecture and language are described in more detail. ...
... The contract specification language put forward by them includes role specifications, deontic characterisations for these roles, statements of representation, the attribution of roles to agents and the relations between roles. The contract specification language described in this paper uses similar concepts with following extensions: specific normative statements called "sanctions" assigned to an authority role (as specified in [13]) an explicit consideration of activation and expiration conditions for normative statements in a contract, to clearly specify the time window during which a normative activity is operative. In addition, this contract specification reflects the clear distinction between actions and states as proposed by Norman & Reed [17]. ...
Agents based on reactive planning architectures use pre-specified plans as behaviour specifications. Typically, such agents are motivated by desires to achieve or maintain states of the world. In this paper, however, we discuss a reactive planning agent architecture – NoA – where the behaviour of an agent is motivated and governed by norms. Normative agents are motivated by obligations to act, prohibitions for acting in particular ways, and permissions to act. Within this context, we focus on the problem of the adoption of a norm: under what circumstances is it appropriate for an agent to adopt a new obligation, prohibition or permission and what effect does it have on the agent's normative state? In particular, the issue of the consistency of a new norm with the norms that currently influence the agent's behaviour is considered. This provides useful input to the decision of whether to adopt a norm. This problem is investigated with respect to the NoA agent architecture, but, it is argued, provides useful insight to the problem of norm consistency in general and particularly where practical reasoning agents are concerned.
An increasing reliance on the Internet and mobile communication has deprived us of our usual means of assessing another party’s trustworthiness. This is increasingly forcing us to rely on control. Yet the notion of trust and trustworthiness is essential to the continued development of a technology-enabled society.
Trust, Complexity and Control offers readers a single, consistent explanation of how the sociological concept of ‘trust’ can be applied to a broad spectrum of technology-related areas; convergent communication, automated agents, digital security, semantic web, artificial intelligence, e-commerce, e-government, privacy etc. It presents a model of confidence in which trust and control are driven and limited by complexity in one explanatory framework and demonstrates how that framework can be applied to different research and application areas. Starting with the individual’s assessment of trust, the book shows the reader how application of the framework can clarify misunderstandings and offer solutions to complex problems.
The uniqueness of Trust, Complexity and Control is its interdisciplinary treatment of a variety of diverse areas using a single framework.
Sections featured include:
Trust and distrust in the digital world.
The impact of convergent communication and networks on trust.
Trust, economy and commerce.
Trust-enhancing technologies.
Trust, Complexity and Control is an invaluable source of reference for both researchers and practitioners within the Trust community. It will also be of benefit to students and lecturers in the fields of information technology, social sciences and computer engineering.
IntroductionDriversTwo Types of ConfidenceStructuring the AreaDigital EquivalenceConclusion
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IntroductionReductive Approach: Security through ControlHolistic Approach: Security through TrustTrust and System DesignConclusion
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IntroductionThe Concept of TETTET PrinciplesTET RequirementsToolsExampleAnother ExampleConclusion
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