mWater Analysis

Abstract

The mWater scenario requires the expression and use of regulations of different sorts: from actual laws and regulations issued by governments, to policies and local regulations issued by basin managers, to social norms that prevail in a given community of users. Some will be regimented as part of the electronic institutional framework specification, but others need to be expressed in a declarative form so that one may reason about them, both off- and on-line, both at design and at run time, and both from the institutional (or legislative) perspective and the agent's individual perspective. Issues that are relevant in this respect range from the choice of expressive formalism to the decision-making strategies that agents might use to comply or disobey regulations. Thus, structural aspects like governance, dynamics of norms (also from the legislative and execution perspectives) as well as criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of norms may and need to be explored in the demonstrator.