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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Notes
- 1.
In OperA a role’s goals are termed objectives and permissions are termed rights.
- 2.
This definition is common in the literature, for example [10].
- 3.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is based on work supported by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Air Force Materiel Command, USAF under Award No. FA9550-15-1-0092. We also thank ECCAI for supporting the keynote talk, by the last author, on which this paper is based.
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Haynes, C., Miles, S., Luck, M. (2016). Probationary Contracts: Reducing Risk in Norm-Based Systems. In: Rovatsos, M., Vouros, G., Julian, V. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems and Agreement Technologies. EUMAS AT 2015 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9571. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33509-4_1
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