Tech Reports

ULCS-08-008

Towards Dynamic Assignment of Rights and Responsibilities to Agents

Farnaz Derakhshan, Peter McBurney and Trevor Bench-Capon

Abstract

Multi-agent computational systems are systems of multiple, interacting software entities. For many such systems, the concepts of organization and roles provide a useful way to structure the activities of agents and of the system, and thus provide a means to structure the design and engineering of these systems. Accordingly, most architectures and frameworks for multi-agent systems (MASs) have some notion of organization and of roles within organizations, and of rights and responsibilities of agents associated to particular roles.

For many applications, the roles, rights and responsibilities of agents may change during the running of the system. In these cases, roles and/or rights and responsibilities (R&Rs) need to be assigned to agents dynamically – ie, at run-time. In this paper, after describing normative issues of R&Rs, dynamic issues in MAS, the issue of dynamic assignment of R&Rs of roles to agents is discussed. The paper presents the basis for our future work aimed at implementing a middleware tool for such dynamic assignment in multi-agent systems.

For each technical report listed here, copyright and all intellectual property rights remain with the respective authors. Copyright is effective from the year of publication in each case. By downloading a file from this page, you agree to use it only for purposes of research and scholarship. Any other use of this material or storage of it in any medium or its sale or distribution in any form is expressly forbidden without prior written permission from the authors concerned.