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From roles to standards: a dynamic maintenance approach using incentives

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Abstract

Social coordination has been addressed in multi-agent systems, making use of concepts such as institutions, norms, commitments, conventions, roles, or trust. In this paper, we argue the need to tackle open and dynamic environments with yet another concept: the notion of a standard, seen as a measurable and non-committing expectation. Not much work has been done in the field of multi-agent systems addressing the evolving nature of roles, especially in open systems, in which changes in the population bring about changes in the expectations generated from roles. Using standards measured from roles as the focus of attention, we propose an incentive-based mechanism to maintain roles over time. This approach is put in contrast with reorganization, which is needed when incentives are not cost-effective. Different search algorithms are proposed to illustrate incentive-based maintenance. Some empirical results are shown based on the principal-agent model from economics.

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Notes

  1. http://oxforddictionaries.com/

  2. Note that this temperature mechanism is not related to simulated annealing, in which the temperature determines the probability of choosing a worse solution; in Algorithm 1 we use it simply to induce and then to reduce exploration, while a new schedule will only be kept if it is found to be better than the best we know of (hence the hill-climbing flavour)

  3. We emphasize that these are the learner’s actions (i.e., those available to the IPM), and not the actions of the provider agent as discussed in Section 4.2. We here use the same term action because it is well established in RL literature.

  4. Except for very low temperature values, see Algorithms 1-3.

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Acknowledgements

The present work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science under projects OVAMAH-TIN2009-13839-C03-02 (co-funded by Plan E) and Agreement Technologies (CONSOLIDER CSD2007-0022, INGENIO 2010) and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness by the project iHAS (grant TIN2012-36586-C03-02).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK

    Ramón Hermoso & Maria Fasli

  2. LIACC / DEI, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200-465, Porto, Portugal

    Henrique Lopes Cardoso

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  1. Ramón Hermoso
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  2. Henrique Lopes Cardoso
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  3. Maria Fasli
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Correspondence to Ramón Hermoso.

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Hermoso, R., Lopes Cardoso, H. & Fasli, M. From roles to standards: a dynamic maintenance approach using incentives. Inf Syst Front 17, 763–778 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-014-9523-4

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