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Holonic Institutions for Multi-scale Polycentric Self-governance

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Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems X (COIN 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9372))

Abstract

Effective institutions are key to the success of self-governing systems, yet specifying and maintaining them can be challenging, especially in large-scale, highly dynamic and competitive contexts. Political economist Elinor Ostrom has studied the conventional arrangements for sustainable natural resource management and derived from these eight design principles for self-governing institutions. One principle, nested enterprises, is straightforwardly expressed, but is arguably structural rather than functional, and so is more resistant to declarative specification; yet it also appears to be critical to the effectiveness of complex compositional systems. In this paper, we converge the ideas of holonic systems with electronic institutions, to propose a formalisation of this principle based on holonic institutions. We show how holonic institutions provide a structural framework for nested enterprises, which can be designed as composite systems of systems. This, we believe, is compatible with Ostrom’s ideas for polycentric governance of complex systems. We use a case study in energy distribution to illustrate these ideas.

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Acknowledgements

Jeremy Pitt was partially supported by the UK EPSRC Grand Challenge project The Autonomic Power System (EP/I031650/1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Telecom ParisTech, 46 Rue Barrault, 75634, Paris Cedex 13, France

    Ada Diaconescu

  2. Imperial College London, Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2BT, UK

    Jeremy Pitt

Authors
  1. Ada Diaconescu
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  2. Jeremy Pitt
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Correspondence to Jeremy Pitt .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science &, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia

    Aditya Ghose

  2. Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom

    Nir Oren

  3. Cisco Systems Inc., Durham, North Carolina, USA

    Pankaj Telang

  4. Comp. Science and Information Technol., RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    John Thangarajah

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Diaconescu, A., Pitt, J. (2015). Holonic Institutions for Multi-scale Polycentric Self-governance. In: Ghose, A., Oren, N., Telang, P., Thangarajah, J. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems X. COIN 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9372. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25420-3_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25420-3_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-25419-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-25420-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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