Revising Institutions Governed by Institutions for Compliant Regulations

Abstract

Institutions governing multi-agent systems (MASs) are a pervasive means to guide agents towards the aims of the MAS (e.g. collecting data) with regulations on the outcomes of agents’ behaviour. Yet, wider organisations/governments often intend to guide the design of institutions governing MAS in meeting different aims (e.g. preserving the rights of agents). A pervasive means to guide the design of MAS-governing institutions (or any institution, for that matter) is to use institutions at higher tiers of governance (e.g. directives, constitutions) to regulate the regulations of institutions at lower tiers of governance (e.g. national legislation, software policies). A recent innovation has been an automated means to determine the compliance of a lower-tier institution’s regulations with a higher-tier’s. However, for a designer of a non-compliant institution there remains a dilemma: be punished for non-compliant regulations or arduously determine and rectify the underlying causes of non-compliance. In this paper we propose a way to automatically determine how to revise an institution to be compliant that also minimises the change in the regulations’ outcomes thus keeping as closely as possible to the institution designers’ original intentions.