Policies for Role Maintenance through Incentives: How to Keep Agents on Track

Roles are usually seen as a descriptive concept that agents adopt so showing expectation on its future interacting behaviour. These expectations, so called standards, may be used to articulate contracts among partners in environments dealing with uncertainty. However, few work has been done in the field of multi-agent systems addressing the evolving nature of roles, especially in open systems, in which changes in the population should bring about changes in the way expectations are assessed. In this paper, we put forward a mechanism to search for appropriate incentives aiming to keep agents fulfilling the expectations generated by the roles they play. Furthermore, we also present role evolution policies that allow the system to re-arrange role players when incentives are not effective. We present some empirical results supporting our approach. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.