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Engineering Democracy in Open Agent Systems

  • Conference paper
Engineering Societies in the Agents World IV (ESAW 2003)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 3071))

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Abstract

How should open agent societies be organized? Should they be democracies, and, if so, what types of democracy? We present three normative models of democracy from political philosophy and consider their relevance for the engineering of open multi-agent systems: democracy as wise rule by an elite; democracy as the exercise of rational consumer choices by voters; and democracy as deliberative decision-making by citizens. We consider the implications of these different models for the design of open systems, in terms of the communications language, the interaction protocol, and the conflict-resolution mechanism used by the agents involved. We also consider the issue of verifiability of the internal semantics of communications languages, and argue that a model of agent democracy based on deliberative democracy provides the basis for a form of verifiability which is stronger than a social semantics.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 7ZF, UK

    Peter McBurney

  2. Department of Computer and Information Science, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY, 11210, USA

    Simon Parsons

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  1. Peter McBurney
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  2. Simon Parsons
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna a Cesena, via Venezia 52, 47023, Cesena, Italy

    Andrea Omicini

  2. Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence,, Freyung 6/6, A-1010, Vienna, Austria

    Paolo Petta

  3. Intelligent Systems & Networks Group, Dept. of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, SW7 2BT, UK

    Jeremy Pitt

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McBurney, P., Parsons, S. (2004). Engineering Democracy in Open Agent Systems. In: Omicini, A., Petta, P., Pitt, J. (eds) Engineering Societies in the Agents World IV. ESAW 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3071. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25946-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25946-6_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-22231-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-25946-6

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