Formal Models of Social Processes: The Pursuit of Computational Justice in Self-Organising Multi-Agent Systems

This SASO tutorial is concerned with the pursuit of computational justice in and for self-organising systems. We contend that many aspects of self-organisation in open systems and socio-technical systems -- such as representation in collective choice arrangements, fairness in resource provision and appropriation, rewards and sanctions for compliance and non-compliance with regulations, quality assessment of self-organised structures and processes --are all underpinned by some notion of justice. We propose computational justice as an interdisciplinary research programme at an intersection between computer science and social sciences, enabling and promoting an exchange of ideas and results in both directions. The aim of this tutorial is to provide students and researchers of self-organising systems with an introduction to the idea of computational justice, its motivation, concepts, tools, methods and applications -- and many open questions.