A Formal Model of Open Agent Societies

摘要

Software agents, although required to act locally, operate in the context of Multi-Agent Systems. It can be argued that some of these systems, like those for electronic auctions, can be best understood as computational societies. To form an open society the requirements are that: 1. There is a need to make the organisational and legal elements of the multi-agent society externally visible, and to provide institutions and formalisations of agent interactions to protect agents from actions of other agents. 2. Open societies should be neutral with respect to the internal architecture of their members. 3. In a society, communication and conformance of behaviour are at least as important as intelligence. We present a society model that addresses these three requirements. Firstly, we view agent societies as normative systems and describe agent behavior and society constraints/laws in terms of normative relations (i.e. what agents are obliged, permitted, have the right to do) given their role (standing) in the society. These society constraints and social roles are formalised with the use of institutional constraints. Secondly, we model agent societies based only on externally observable actions and state of affairs, thus we mainly reason about the global state of a system. Thirdly, we explicitly represent the aspects of communication, norms and agent ownership as parameters of the agent society. Furthermore, we make use of a temporal parameter to enable us identify the way societies change and possibly evolve over time.