Abstract
Virtual Organizations (VOs) consist of groups of agents that collaborate towards achieving their specified goals. VO Partners are independent, autonomous, and heterogeneous, thus often exhibiting complex behaviors in co-working. Frictional behavior demonstrated by even a few partners, may cause drastic results and total failure of the VO. Therefore, it is necessary to model and analyze VO partners’ behavior. This paper introduces the VO Supervision Assistance Tool (VOSAT), developed based on leveraging partners’ commitments/promises, to monitor partners’ behavior against the synergetic norms in the VO. For this purpose, three kinds of behavioral norms are defined, including: socio-legal norms, functional norms, and activity-related norms. Additionally, a fuzzy norm is introduced to indicate agents’ trustworthy behavior. The functionalities supported in VOSAT enable the VO coordinator with identifying the high risk tasks and the weak or weakest points in the flow of VO planned operations. It further assists the coordinator with finding suitable candidate partners for handling the exceptions that arise during the VO operation phase. These in turn improve the success rate of the VOs.
Chapter PDF
References
Afsarmanesh, H., Camarinha-Matos, L.M.: On the classification and management of Virtual organisation Breeding Environments. IJITM 8(3), 234–259 (2009)
Gao, W.: Study on the Construction and Benefits and Risks of Virtual Enterprise. Harbin Institute of Technology (2004)
Sun, X., Huang, M., Wang, X.: Tabu search based distributed risk management for virtual enterprise. In: Industrial Electronics and Applications, pp. 2366–2370. IEEE Press, Harbin (2007)
Shadi, M., Afsarmanesh, H., Dastani, M.: Agent Behaviour Monitoring in Virtual Organizations. In: 22nd IEEE International Conference on Enabling Technologies Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE), IEEE Press, Tunisia (2013)
Tinnemeier, N.A., Dastani, M.M., Meyer, J.J., Torre, L.: Programming normative artifacts with declarative obligations and prohibitions. In: IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technologies, pp. 145–152 (2009)
Dastani, M., Grossi, D., Meyer, J.-J.C., Tinnemeier, N.: Normative multi-agent programs and their logics. In: Meyer, J.-J.C., Broersen, J. (eds.) KRAMAS 2008. LNCS, vol. 5605, pp. 16–31. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Social knowledge for e-governance (eRep), http://megatron.iiia.csic.es/eRep
Msanjila, S.S., Afsarmanesh, H.: Trust analysis and assessment in virtual organization breeding environments. International Journal of Production Research 46(5), 1253–1295 (2008)
Li, L.J., Shen, L.T.: An improved multilevel fuzzy comprehensive evaluation algorithm for security performance. The Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications 13(4), 48–53 (2006)
Patel, A.V., Mohan, B.M.: Some numerical aspects of center of area defuzzification method. Fuzzy Sets and Systems 132(3), 401–409 (2002)
Sandholm, T., Lesser, V.R.: Levelled Commitment Contracts and Strategic Breach. Games and Economic Behavior, 212–270 (2001)
Excelente-Toledo, C.B., Bourne, R.A., Jennings, N.R.: Reasoning about commitments and penalties for coordination between autonomous agents. In: Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents, pp. 131–138. ACM (2001)
Sallé, M.: Electronic Contract Framework for Contractual Agents. In: Cohen, R., Spencer, B. (eds.) Canadian AI 2002. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2338, pp. 349–353. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Dignum, V., Dignum, F.: Modelling agent societies: Co-ordination frameworks and institutions. In: Brazdil, P.B., Jorge, A.M. (eds.) EPIA 2001. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2258, pp. 191–204. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Cardoso, H.L., Oliveira, E.: Virtual Enterprise Normative Framework Within Electronic Institutions. In: Gleizes, M.-P., Omicini, A., Zambonelli, F. (eds.) ESAW 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3451, pp. 14–32. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Burgess, M.: An Approach to Understanding Policy Based on Autonomy and Voluntary Cooperation. In: Proceeding of 16th IFIP/IEEE Distributed Systems Operations and Management (2005)
Zhao, X., Lin, Z.: Modeling belief, capability and promise for cognitive agents - A modal logic approach. In: Wang, L., Chen, K., S. Ong, Y. (eds.) ICNC 2005. LNCS, vol. 3610, pp. 825–834. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Vasconcelos, W.W., Kollingbaum, M.J., Norman, T.J.: Normative conflict resolution in multi-agent systems. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 19(2), 124–152 (2009)
Giddens, A.: The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. John Wiley & Sons (2013)
Herzig, A., Lorini, E., Hubner, J.F., Ben-Naim, J., Castelfranchi, C., Demolombe, R., Longin, D., Vercouter, L.: Prolegomena for a logic of trust and reputation. In: NORMAS 2008, pp. 143–157 (2008)
Carbo, J., Molina, J.M., Davila, J.: Trust management through fuzzy reputation. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems 12(1), 135–155 (2003)
Yu, B., Singh, M.P.: A social mechanism of reputation management in electronic communities. In: Klusch, M., Kerschberg, L. (eds.) CIA 2000. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 1860, pp. 154–165. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Josang, A., Ismail, R., Boyd, C.: A survey of trust and reputation systems for online service provision. Decision Support Systems 43(2), 618–644 (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Shadi, M., Afsarmanesh, H. (2014). Behavioral Norms in Virtual Organizations. In: Camarinha-Matos, L.M., Afsarmanesh, H. (eds) Collaborative Systems for Smart Networked Environments. PRO-VE 2014. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 434. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44745-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44745-1_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-44744-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-44745-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)