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Chris Haynes

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2 papers

2 author rows

KER Journal 2017 Journal Article

Engineering the emergence of norms: a review

Chris Haynes
Michael Luck
Peter McBurney
Samhar Mahmoud
Tomáš Vítek
Simon Miles

Abstract Complex systems often exhibit emergent behaviour, unexpected macro-level behaviour caused by the interaction of micro-level components. In multiagent systems, these micro-level components may be autonomous agents and the emergent behaviour may be expressed as norms—patterns of behaviour that arise among the agents in response to their environment and each other. These emergent norms may be beneficial (e.g. by encouraging cooperative behaviour), or detrimental, but in either case it is useful to recognize these norms as they emerge and either encourage or discourage their establishment. We term this process engineering the emergence of norms and have identified three steps: the identification of a possible norm, evaluation of its benefit and its encouragement (or discouragement). This paper is an attempt to provide a survey of existing research related to these steps. We also provide an analysis of the approaches based upon their suitability for a variety of normative systems: we examine the requirements for agents to have autonomy over their choice of norms, the degree of observability required in the system, and the norm enforcement methods. The paper concludes with an discussion of open issues.

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EUMAS Conference 2015 Invited Paper

Probationary Contracts: Reducing Risk in Norm-Based Systems

Chris Haynes
Simon Miles
Michael Luck

Abstract In human organisations, it is common to subject a new employees to periods of probation for which additional restrictions or oversight apply in order to reduce the consequences of poor recruitment choice. In a similar way, multi-agent organisations may need to employ agents of unknown trustworthiness to perform services defined by contracts (or sets of norms), yet these agents may violate the norms for their own advantage. Here, the risk of employing such agents depends on the agents trustworthiness and the consequences of norm violation. In response, in this paper we propose the use of probationary contracts, generated by adding obligations to standard contracts in order to further constrain agent behaviour. We evaluate our work using agent-based simulations of abstract tasks, and present results showing that using probationary roles reduces the risk of using unknown agents, especially where violating a norm has serious consequences.

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