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Organizations and Collective Obligations

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Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2000)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1873))

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Abstract

Multi-Agent Systems are computational systems in which a collection of autonomous agents interact to achieve a certain task, for example to fulfil an obligation directed to the whole group, i.e., a collective obligation. Since, such a collective obligation is beyond the capacity of an individual agent, the agents have to communicate, cooperate, coordinate and negotiate with each other, to achieve the collective task: the fulfilment of the obligation. In this paper we discuss and formalise collective aspects of obligations and commitments. Collective obligations are analysed and formalised in a deontic logic framework. The notions of individual and collective commitment are defined to specify which individual has the responsibility to fulfill an ‘internal’ obligation as part of the collective obligation. In distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) theories of organisations, it is emphasized that ‘commitment’ is a crucial notion to analyse a collective activity or the structure of an organisation. In this paper we give a first attempt to formalise the notion of commitment to determine which plan has to be followed to achieve a joint goal, i.e. the fulfillment of a collective obligation by using several concepts as commitment, delegation and authority-relation.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Technology Management and Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O.box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Lambèr Royakkers & Frank Dignum

Authors
  1. Lambèr Royakkers
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  2. Frank Dignum
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Maritime Greenwich University Campus, 30 Park Row, London, SE10 9LS, UK

    Mohamed Ibrahim

  2. University of Linz, FAW, Altenbergerstr. 69, 4040, Linz, Austria

    Josef Küng

  3. Middlesex University, Bounds Green, London, UK

    Norman Revell

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Royakkers, L., Dignum, F. (2000). Organizations and Collective Obligations. In: Ibrahim, M., Küng, J., Revell, N. (eds) Database and Expert Systems Applications. DEXA 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1873. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44469-6_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44469-6_28

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67978-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44469-5

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