Towards a Value-Sensitive System to support Agents in Norm - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

18-8-2010

Challenge the future

Delft University of Technology

Towards a Value-Sensitive System to support Agents in Norm Fulfillment and Enforcement

IAT4EB 2010

Sietse Overbeek, Virginia Dignum and Yao-hua Tan Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management Delft University of Technology

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Menu

Starters:

• Regulatory compliance
• Normative systems
• Value-sensitive design

Main dishes:

• Formalization and application of values
• Design outline of value-sensitive system

Dessert:

• Conclusions & discussion

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• There is an increasing pressure to increase organizational

transparency

• Proper IT support for regulative activities is on the rise
• The cost of regulation is increasing

Significance of regulation

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Compliance to regulations (I)

• Organizations are increasingly aware that not only their business

processes must be efficient, they are also subject to regulations

• Failure to comply to regulations diminishes the added-value that

business processes represent for the organization, e.g. through non-optimal alignment with: 1. quality standards, 2. business partner service agreements, 3. non-identified security flaws.

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Compliance to regulations (II)

• Non-compliance to regulations can also be the cause of judiciary

pursuits as many financial scandals in recent years demonstrate

• Examples of these are the cases of Enron, WorldCom, Roche,

Siemens, and Volkswagen

• Enterprises, governmental institutions, and the public in general

benefit from well-defined and well-enforced laws and legal guidelines, in order to protect companies and their stakeholders from manipulations of financial reporting data

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Normative systems (I)

• Moral values are the standards of good and evil that guide an

individual’s behavior and choices

• Individuals, groups, and societies develop own value systems

used for the purpose of ethical integrity

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Normative systems (II)

• A norm can be defined as: standard behavior that is acceptable

for the regulating institutions, indicating desirable behaviors that should be carried out as well as undesirable behaviors that should be avoided

• Norm compliance mechanisms are used to enable
• rganizations to identify and adhere to norms imposed to them
• Norm enforcement mechanisms are used to determine if
• rganizations have complied to the norms that they should

satisfy

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Normative systems (III)

• The nature of interaction between regulating institutions or

governments and the actors or companies being regulated is changing from monolithic control by governments to distributed environments

• A special case in which centralized models of operation is

increasingly hard to sustain is that of regulation or norm enforcement

• Regulation of organizational processes is based on the norms

that organizations have to comply with

• If norms are to be enforced, then the institution should specify

and handle sanctions for every possible violation of the norms

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Normative systems (IV)

• Special regulators actively monitor the behavior of other agents
• Such agents are assigned to monitor the behavior of
• rganizations and sanction them in case of norm violations
• Implementing self-regulation as a control mechanism thus

results in a redistribution or delegation of control tasks among the agents

• Which enforcement mechanisms are effective and how sanctions

are likely to be followed is directly related to the values of an

• rganization

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Value-sensitive design (I)

• The value notion and the two mentioned different types of norm

enforcement mechanisms can be combined to design a value- sensitive system that supports agents in norm compliance and norm enforcement

• Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is a methodological design

approach that aims at making moral values part of technological design, research, and development

• Values are typically high-level abstract concepts that are

difficult to incorporate in software design

• Developers are typically not aware of the underlying values
• Design can also generate new values, not just embed

existing ones

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Value-sensitive design (II)

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Formalization of values (I)

• An increasingly important value in organizations is that of ethical

and transparent business practices

• The development of codes and standards for ethical and

transparent business practices can help limit corruption, ensure fair and open competition, and encourage a better business environment

• A formalism for values must be able to describe and reason

about social structures and interactions, facilitating analysis and verification through logical reasoning

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Formalization of values (II)

• In open systems where agents are assumed to be autonomous

and rational, agents can violate social norms and regulations

• In multi-agent systems, norms have been identified as crucial

tools to formally express the expected behaviour of agents in

• pen environments
• Deontic logic provides mechanisms to reason about violability of

norms, that is, about how to proceed when norms are violated

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Example

• Value: ethical and transparent business practices.
• Regulation of organization activity:
• What are you supposed to do, what are you doing?
• Who is cares? Who is checking?

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Formal representation of values

• Example - norm compliance:
• Example - norm violation:

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Applying formal values

• Direct control:
• In case of self regulation, the separation of roles is not assumed

and an actor will try to prevent sanctions itself

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Example

• How to regulate organizational activity
• Direct control
• Self regulation
• Division of duties
• Flexibility
• Cost
• Extendibility

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Activity diagram of direct control

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Activity diagram of self regulation

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Operational values

• Example operationalization of the interpret norm framework

activity

• Example norm framework te be interpreted by an agent:
• These norms are borrowed from the Dutch Tax Administration

and are applicable for national tax declarations

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Conclusions

• The presented research provides the basis for a value-sensitive

system to support actor agents in norm fulfillment and regulating agents in norm enforcement

• By following the VSD development process, the value that is

created for the agents that apply the norm enforcement mechanisms of direct control and self regulation is explicitly incorporated in the development of the system

• The process consists of three phases: value interpretation, value

concretization, and implementation of the values into the development of the system. The interpretation phase has been fully described

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Future work

• The approach that we have taken is generic enough to be

applied to other types of cross-enterprise collaboration

• In order to provide a richer semantics to the current formal

model, we are working on a deontic logic representation

• Moreover, we are extending this research towards the realization
• f a full system implementation by fulfilling the VSD process

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