Creating Trust in Collaborative Embedded Systems

Effective collaboration of embedded systems relies strongly on the assumption that all components of the system and the system itself operate as expected. A level of trust is established based on that assumption. To verify and validate these assumptions, we propose a systematic procedure that starts at the design phase and spans the runtime of the systems. At design time, we propose system evaluation in pure virtual environments, allowing multiple system behaviors to be executed in a variety of scenarios. At runtime, we suggest performing predictive simulation to get insights into the system’s decisionmaking process. This enables trust to be created in the system part of a cooperation. When cooperation is performed in open, uncertain environments, the negotiation protocols between collaborative systems must be monitored at runtime. By engaging in various negotiation protocols, the participants assign roles, schedule tasks, and combine their world views to allow more resilient perception and planning. In this chapter, we describe two complementary monitoring approaches to address the decentralized nature of collaborative embedded systems.

Negotiation Strategies for Agents with Ordinal Preferences

Negotiation is a very common interaction between automated agents. Many common negotiation protocols work with cardinal utilities, even though ordinal preferences, which only rank the outcomes, are easier to elicit from humans. In this work we concentrate on negotiation with ordinal preferences over a finite set of outcomes. We study an intuitive protocol for bilateral negotiation, where the two parties make offers alternately. We analyze the negotiation protocol under different settings. First, we assume that each party has full information about the other party's preference order. We provide elegant strategies that specify a sub-game perfect equilibrium for the agents. We further show how the studied negotiation protocol almost completely implements a known bargaining rule. Finally, we analyze the no information setting. We study several solution concepts that are distribution-free, and analyze both the case where neither party knows the preference order of the other party, and the case where only one party is uninformed.

Negotiations of resource allocation in the process of organization manufacturing system structure under condition of distributed resources

This paper focuses on the problem of resources allocation in the process of shaping distributed structure of network manufacturing system. The aim of this paper is to show the proposal of the negotiation protocols, which are applicable in the process of organization network manufacturing system under condition of distributed resources. Negotiations protocols enable to negotiate the resources allocation according to the predefined assumptions.

Triggers for securitization: a discursive examination of Israeli–Palestinian water negotiations

Discursive studies on natural resources often fail to examine how the language of existential threats is constructed, while the probable contextual factors for triggering securitization and its implications are also left unexamined. Applied to the Israeli–Palestinian water conflict, this study utilizes negotiation protocols from the Annapolis peace process to quantitatively examine how securitized discourses are triggered and constructed. The study determines that asymmetric actor ratio and negative background events trigger securitizing moves that in this case perpetuate enmity and division. Securitization under conflict scenarios is found to be mostly detrimental to the resolution of water issues as the resource becomes secondary to other high-profile concerns. A more favorable securitized discourse is identified, but this discourse is infrequent and characteristically aligned with the literature that espouses desecuritization.