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

Towards a Value-Sensitive System to support Agents in Norm Fulfillment and Enforcement IAT4EB 2010 18-8-2010 Sietse Overbeek , Virginia Dignum and Yao-hua Tan Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management Delft University of Technology Delft University of Technology Challenge the future

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 Titel van de presentatie 2

Significance of regulation • 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 Titel van de presentatie 3

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. Titel van de presentatie 4

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 Titel van de presentatie 5

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 Titel van de presentatie 6

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 • organizations to identify and adhere to norms imposed to them Norm enforcement mechanisms are used to determine if • organizations have complied to the norms that they should satisfy Titel van de presentatie 7

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 Titel van de presentatie 8

Normative systems (IV) • Special regulators actively monitor the behavior of other agents • Such agents are assigned to monitor the behavior of organizations 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 organization Titel van de presentatie 9

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 Titel van de presentatie 10

Value-sensitive design (II) ? Titel van de presentatie 11

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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 Titel van de presentatie 13

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 open environments • Deontic logic provides mechanisms to reason about violability of norms, that is, about how to proceed when norms are violated Titel van de presentatie 14

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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? Titel van de presentatie 16

Formal representation of values • Example - norm compliance: • Example - norm violation: Titel van de presentatie 17

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 Titel van de presentatie 18

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Example • How to regulate organizational activity • Direct control • Self regulation • Division of duties • Flexibility • Cost • Extendibility Titel van de presentatie 20

Activity diagram of direct control Titel van de presentatie 21

Activity diagram of self regulation Titel van de presentatie 22

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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 Titel van de presentatie 25

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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 Titel van de presentatie 27

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 of a full system implementation by fulfilling the VSD process Titel van de presentatie 28

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