Flexible Behaviour Regulation in Agent Based Systems

Abstract

Just as in human societies, for which we have developed reasonably effective systems to organise and manage interactions in such a way as to minimise the impact of erroneous or malicious behaviour, we also need to find ways to organise and manage computational entities in order to mitigate their potential deleterious effect on computational systems. In this paper, therefore, we analyse the role of trust, organisations and norms in a motivation-based view of agency that seeks to regulate behaviour, and illustrate some of these issues with aspects of several projects, including the CONTRACT project, concerned with electronic contract-based e-business systems