A Commitment-based Infrastructure for Programming Socio-Technical Systems

Socio-Technical Systems demand an evolution of computing into social computing, with a transition from an individualistic to a societal view. As such, they seem particularly suitable to realize multi-party, cross-organizational systems. Multi-Agent Systems are a natural candidate to realize Socio-Technical Systems. However, while Socio-Technical Systems envisage an explicit layer that contains the regulations that all parties must respect in their interaction, and thus preserve the agents’ autonomy, current frameworks and platforms require to hard-code the coordination requirements inside the agents. We propose to explicitly represent the missing layer of Socio-Technical Systems in terms of social relationships among the involved parties, i.e. in terms of a set of normatively defined relationships among two or more parties, subject to social control by monitoring the observable behaviour. In our proposal, social relationships are resources, available to agents, who use them in their practical reasoning. Both agents and social relationships are first-class entities of the model. The work also describes 2COMM4JADE, a framework that realizes the proposal by extending the well-known JADE and CArtAgO. The impact of the approach on programming is explained both conceptually and with the help of an example.