According to H. Simon basically all viable systems, be they physical, social, biological, artificial, share the property of having a near decomposable architecture: they are organized into hierarchical layers of parts, parts of parts, parts of parts of parts and so on, in such a way that interactions among elements belonging to the same parts are much more than interactions among elements belonging to different parts. By “intense” interaction is meant that the behavior of one component depends more closely on the behavior of other components belonging to the same part than on components belonging to other parts (i.e. the cross-derivatives are larger within a part). This kind of architecture can be found in business firms, where division of labor, divisionalization, hierarchical decomposition of tasks are all elements which define a near decomposable system: individuals within a hierarchical subunit have closer, more widespread, more intense and more frequent interactions than individuals belonging to different subunits. But a very similar architecture can also be found in most complex artifacts (which are made by assembling parts and components, which in turn can be assemblies of other parts and components, and so on), in software (with the use of subroutines, and even more so in object-oriented programming) (Egidi and Marengo, 2006).
Published in Chapter:
Dynamic Specifications for Norm-Governed Systems
Alexander Artikis (National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, Greece), Dimosthenis Kaponis (Imperial College London, UK), and Jeremy Pitt (Imperial College London, UK)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 20
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-256-5.ch019
Abstract
We have been developing a framework for executable specification of norm-governed multi-agent systems. In this framework, specification is a design-time activity; moreover, there is no support for run-time modification of the specification. Due to environmental, social, or other conditions, however, it is often desirable, or even necessary, to alter the system specification during the system execution. In this chapter we extend our framework by allowing for “dynamic specifications”, that is, specifications that may be modified at run-time by the members of a system. The framework extension is motivated by Brewka’s “dynamic argument systems”—argument systems in which the rules of order may become the topic of the debate. We illustrate our framework for dynamic specifications by presenting: (i) a dynamic specification of an argumentation protocol, and (ii) an execution of this protocol in which the participating agents modify the protocol specification.