From Self-Organising Institutions to Self-Aware Institutions: Experimental Results and Prospective Challenges

In this paper, we investigate further the idea of applying socio-economic principles for common pool resource management to the development of self-organising institutions for managing open, embedded and resource-bounded systems. We report on the design and implementation of a system for experimenting with the effect of these socio-economic principles on enduring institutions. These experiments demonstrate the importance of measuring and monitoring, adaptation of behaviour and institutional rules to be congruent with the environment, and the need for cost-effective conflict resolution to help distinguish between intentional and unintentional violations of the rules. The experiments inform the transformation of socio-economic principles into design guidelines for systems engineering, and that these guidelines should be made available by introspection to the system components themselves. This is an essential aspect of awareness, and we outline a number of research challenges in developing self-aware institutions for smarter infrastructure management.