Meet the Meter: Visualising SmartGrids using Self-Organising Electronic Institutions and Serious Games
Publication Type:
Conference PaperSource:
2nd AWARE workshop on Challenges for Achieving Self-Awareness in Autonomic Systems, SASO 2012: Lyon, France (2012)Keywords:
SmartGrids; Serious Games; InstitutionsAbstract:
Given that SmartGrids focus on the demand side and are predicated on consumer participation, in this paper we examine an innovative user-infrastructure interface for SmartGrids, in which information visualisation for comparative feedback and new affordances for the Smart Meter are integrated within a virtual environment for a Serious Game. Moreover, in the context of a micro-Grid, we seek to encapsulate aspects of self-organisation and support the principles of enduring institutions through the same interface. We give an example to explain how some of the activities (rooms in the virtual environment) can be structured within the context of an electronic institution. In this way, we aim to use the SmartMeter to promote 'assistive awareness', not just for consumer participation, but also for other aspects of user engagement with critical infrastructure, for example as a citizen, as a stakeholder, and as a practitioner.
Dynamic Sanctioning for Robust and Cost-Efficient Norm Compliance
Publication Type:
Conference PaperSource:
Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence, IJCAI/AAAI, Barcelona, p.414-419 (2011)ISBN:
978-1-57735-516-8Abstract:
As explained by Axelrod in his seminal work An Evolutionary Approach to Norms, punishment is a key mechanism to achieve the necessary social control and to impose social norms in a self-regulated society. In this paper, we distinguish between two enforcing mechanisms. i.e. punishment and sanction, focusing on the specific ways in which they favor the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. The key research question is to find more stable and cheaper mechanisms for norm compliance in hybrid social environments (populated by humans and computational agents). To achieve this task, we have developed a normative agent able to punish and sanction defectors and to dynamically choose the right amount of punishment and sanction to impose on them (Dynamic Adaptation Heuristic). The results obtained through agent-based simulation show us that sanction is more effective and less costly than punishment in the achievement and maintenance of cooperation and it makes the population more resilient to sudden changes than if it were enforced only by mere punishment.
Self-Conguring Sensors for Uncharted Environments
Publication Type:
Conference PaperSource:
The Second Workshop on Cooperative Games in Multiagent Systems (CoopMAS-2011) . Workshop co-located with AAMAS-2011, Taipei, Taiiwan (2011)Keywords:
agents; self-organisationAn Assistance Infrastructure for open MAS
Publication Type:
Conference PaperSource:
14th International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Volume 232, Lleida, Catalonia, Spain, p.1-10 (2011)ISBN:
978-1-60750-841-0Keywords:
coordination support; organisations and institutions; self-organisation; agent assistanceAbstract:
Organisations are an effective mechanism to define the coordination model that structure agent interactions in Open MAS. Execution infrastructures mediate agents interactions while enforcing the rules imposed by the organisation. Although infrastructures usually provide open specifications to agents, understanding this specification and participating in the organisation could result a difficult task to agents, specially when the system is hybrid (i.e participants can be both human and software agents) and its specification becomes more and more complex. In this paper, we formalize an Assistance Infrastructure for Hybrid open MAS that helps agents to pursue their particular goals and, when they are aligned with global goals, lead to a better system’s global performance. With this aim, we propose four advanced services (offered by the assistance infrastructure in a distributed way): (1) refined information, (2) justification, (3) advice and (4) estimation. We define two types of assistant agents. A Personal Assistant provides direct and sole support to one agent while a Group Assistant performs those complex processes which affect a group of participants with common services of interest.
