Abstract
Policies have traditionally been a way to specify properties of a system. In this paper, we show how policies can be applied to the Organization Model for Adaptive Computational Systems (OMACS). In OMACS, policies may constrain assignments of agents to roles, the structure of the goal model for the organization, or how an agent may play a particular role. In this paper, we focus on policies limiting system traces; this is done to leverage the work already done for specification and verification of properties in concurrent programs. We show how traditional policies can be characterized as law policies; that is, they must always be followed by a system. In the context of multiagent systems, law policies limit the flexibility of the system. Thus, in order to preserve the system flexibility while still being able to guide the system into preferring certain behaviors, we introduce the concept of guidance policies. These guidance policies need not always be followed; when the system cannot continue with the guidance policies, they may be suspended. We show how this can guide how the system achieves the top-level goal while not decreasing flexibility of the system. Guidance policies are formally defined and, since multiple guidance policies can introduce conflicts, a strategy for resolving conflicts is given.
This work was supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation (0347545) and the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-06-1-0058).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Kephart, J.O., Chess, D.M.: The vision of autonomic computing. Computer 36(1), 41–50 (2003)
Bradshaw, J., Uszok, A., Jeffers, R., Suri, N., Hayes, P., Burstein, M., Acquisti, A., Benyo, B., Breedy, M., Carvalho, M., Diller, D., Johnson, M., Kulkarni, S., Lott, J., Sierhuis, M., Van Hoof, R.: Representation and reasoning for DAML-based policy and domain services in KAoS and Nomads. In: AAMAS 2003: Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, pp. 835–842. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Shoham, Y., Tennenholtz, M.: On social laws for artificial agent societies: Off-line design. Artificial Intelligence 73(1-2), 231–252 (1995)
Stoller, S.D., Unnikrishnan, L., Liu, Y.A.: Efficient detection of global properties in distributed systems using partial-order methods. In: Emerson, E.A., Sistla, A.P. (eds.) CAV 2000. LNCS, vol. 1855, pp. 264–279. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Kagal, L., Finin, T., Joshi, A.: A policy based approach to security for the semantic web. In: Fensel, D., Sycara, K.P., Mylopoulos, J. (eds.) ISWC 2003. LNCS, vol. 2870, pp. 402–418. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Paruchuri, P., Tambe, M., Ordóñez, F., Kraus, S.: Security in multiagent systems by policy randomization. In: AAMAS 2006: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, pp. 273–280. ACM Press, New York (2006)
Uszok, A., Bradshaw, J., Jeffers, R., Suri, N., Hayes, P., Breedy, M., Bunch, L., Johnson, M., Kulkarni, S., Lott, J.: Kaos policy and domain services: toward a description-logic approach to policy representation, deconfliction, and enforcement. In: POLICY 2003: IEEE 4th International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, pp. 93–96. IEEE, Los Alamitos (2003)
Artikis, A., Sergot, M., Pitt, J.: Specifying norm-governed computational societies. ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (2007)
Viganò, F., Colombetti, M.: Symbolic Model Checking of Institutions. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Electronic Commerce (2007)
DeLoach, S.A., Oyenan, W., Matson, E.T.: A capabilities based theory of artificial organizations. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (2007)
Miller, M.: A goal model for dynamic systems. Master’s thesis, Kansas State University (April 2007)
Zambonelli, F., Jennings, N.R., Wooldridge, M.: Organisational rules as an abstraction for the analysis and design of multi-agent systems. International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering 11(3), 303–328 (2001)
DeLoach, S.A.: Modeling organizational rules in the multi-agent systems engineering methodology. In: Cohen, R., Spencer, B. (eds.) Canadian AI 2002. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2338, pp. 1–15. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Robby, DeLoach, S.A., Kolesnikov, V.A.: Using design metrics for predicting system flexibility. In: Baresi, L., Heckel, R. (eds.) FASE 2006 and ETAPS 2006. LNCS, vol. 3922, pp. 184–198. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Zhong, C., DeLoach, S.A.: An investigation of reorganization algorithms. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ICAI 2006), Las Vegas, Nevada, pp. 514–517. CSREA Press (June 2006)
DiLeo, J., Jacobs, T., DeLoach, S.: Integrating ontologies into multiagent systems engineering. In: Fourth International Conference on Agent-Oriented Information Systems (AIOS 2002), CEUR-WS.org (July 2002)
Corbett, J.C., Dwyer, M.B., Hatcliff, J., Robby: Expressing checkable properties of dynamic systems: The bandera specification language. International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT) 4(1), 34–56 (2002)
Manna, Z., Pnueli, A.: The Temporal Logic of Reactive and Concurrent Systems: Specification. Springer, Heidelberg (1991)
Büchi, J.R.: On a decision method in restricted second-order arithmetics. In: Proceedings of International Congress of Logic Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Palo Alto, CA, USA, pp. 1–12. Stanford University Press (1960)
Olender, K.M., Osterweil, L.J.: Cecil: A sequencing constraint language for automatic static analysis generation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 16(3), 268–280 (1990)
Chaki, S., Clarke, E.M., Ouaknine, J., Sharygina, N., Sinha, N.: State/event-based software model checking. In: Boiten, E.A., Derrick, J., Smith, G.P. (eds.) IFM 2004. LNCS, vol. 2999, pp. 128–147. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Clarke Jr., E.M., Grumberg, O., Peled, D.A.: Model Checking. MIT Press, Cambridge (1999)
Ligatti, J., Bauer, L., Walker, D.: Edit automata: Enforcement mechanisms for run-time security policies. In: International Journal of Information Security, vol. 4, pp. 2–16. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Dwyer, M.B., Avrunin, G.S., Corbett, J.C.: Patterns in property specifications for finite-state verification. In: Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE, Los Alamitos (1999)
Smith, R.L., Avrunin, G.S., Clarke, L.A., Osterweil, L.J.: Propel: an approach supporting property elucidation. In: ICSE 2002: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 11–21. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Peña, J., Hinchey, M.G., Sterritt, R.: Towards modeling, specifying and deploying policies in autonomous and autonomic systems using an AOSE methodology. EASE 0, 37–46 (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Harmon, S.J., DeLoach, S.A., Robby (2008). Trace-Based Specification of Law and Guidance Policies for Multi-Agent Systems. In: Artikis, A., O’Hare, G.M.P., Stathis, K., Vouros, G. (eds) Engineering Societies in the Agents World VIII. ESAW 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4995. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87654-0_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87654-0_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-87653-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-87654-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)