The Axiomatisation of Socio-Economic Principles for Self-Organising Systems

Abstract

We are interested in engineering for open, embedded and resource-constrained systems, which have applications in ad hoc, sensor and opportunistic networks. In such systems, there is decentralised control, competition for resources and an expectation of both intentional and unintentional errors. The 'optimal' distribution of resources is then less important than the 'robustness' or 'survivability' of the distribution mechanism, based on collective decision-making and tolerance of unintentional errors. We therefore seek to model resource allocation in the network as a common pool resource management problem, and apply a formal characterisation of Ostrom's socio-economic principles for building enduring institutions. This paper presents a complete axiomatisation in the Event Calculus of six of Ostrom's eight principles, describes a preliminary testbed for experimenting with the axiomatisation, and considers the work from a methodological perspective of sociologically-inspired computing for self-organising systems.