Autonomy vs. Conformity: An Institutional Perspective on Norms and Protocols

The research presented in this thesis is part of the ToKeN project ANITA (Administrative Normative Information Transaction Agents). In this domain the main challenges concern both the shortage of information (not being able to find legally relevant data that should be available) as well as the abundance of information (for example violating privacy rights). These issues are of great consequence in the domain of police and judicial intelligence. In the ANITA scenario, where agents autonomously decide whether or not to share (privacy sensitive) information based on the applicability of (local) norms, a global frame for the enforcement of (global) norms was needed. Since all agents have to adhere to the global regulations as given by law, it has to be checked whether the information transactions are not in conflict with the laws that hold for the domain. In most software and agent methodologies, such regulations are seen only as extra requirements in the analysis phase, and are thus hard-coded into the software or agents themselves. If, however, the regulations change it becomes very hard to track all the norms (that is, all the design steps have to be checked and all the code verified to ensure compliance to the new regulations). The alternative is to have an explicit representation of the norms, but this approach requires some form of enforcement to ensure the compliance instead. This alternative can be found in the introduction of an electronic institution. Electronic institutions, similar to their human counterparts, provide a safe environment mediating the interaction of agents, where the expected behaviour of the agents is expressed by norms. The introduction of an electronic institution in a highly-regulated domain such as the ANITA scenario, requires us to solve issues related to the abstractness of human regulations, the lack of operational information and the implementation of norm enforcement from an institutional perspective. In this thesis we solve these problems by the introduction of a framework for making the connections between the norms and the agent practice explicit. An electronic institution is characterised by the normative specification and its procedures. Both the normative specification and the procedures, expressed in protocols that the agents can use to achieve common tasks, are derived from the law and regulations that govern the domain. To ensure that none of these laws are broken by any of the agents participating in the institution, some form of enforcement is required. This can either be done by restricting the agents to specific procedures (that are known to be norm-compliant) or by monitoring the behaviour of the agents and punishing them in the case they violate a norm. We argue that the latter holds many benefits, since restricting agents to pre-defined procedures severely reduces the autonomy of the agents participating in the institution. The implementation of norms, as presented in this work, by the creation of a mechanism of active norm enforcement ensures a good balance between autonomy and conformity of the agents participating in the electronic institution.