Policies for role maintenance through incentives: how to keep agents on track

Abstract

Roles are usually seen as a descriptive concept that agentsadopt so showing expectation on its future interacting behaviour. Theseexpectations, so called standards, may be used to articulate contractsamong partners in environments dealing with uncertainty. However, fewwork has been done in the field of multi-agent systems addressing theevolving nature of roles, especially in open systems, in which changesin the population should bring about changes in the way expectationsare assessed. In this paper, we put forward a mechanism to search forappropriate incentives aiming to keep agents fulfilling the expectationsgenerated by the roles they play. Furthermore, we also present role evolutionpolicies that allow the system to re-arrange role players when incentivesare not effective. We present some empirical results supportingour approach.