Custard: Computing Norm States over Information Stores
Title | Custard: Computing Norm States over Information Stores |
Publication Type | Conference Paper |
Year of Publication | 2016 |
Authors | Amit K. Chopra, Munindar P. Singh |
Conference Name | Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) |
Date Published | 05/2016 |
Publisher | IFAAMAS |
Conference Location | Singapore |
Keywords | Apr'16, Formal Specification and Analysis of Security-Critical Norms and Policies, NCSU |
Abstract | Norms provide a way to model the social architecture of a sociotechnical system (STS) and are thus crucial for understanding how such a system supports secure collaboration between principals,that is, autonomous parties such as humans and organizations. Accordingly, an important challenge is to compute the state of a norm instance at runtime in a sociotechnical system. Custard addresses this challenge by providing a relational syntax for schemas of important norm types along with their canonical lifecycles and providing a mapping from each schema to queries that compute instances of the schema in different lifecycle stages. In essence, Custard supports a norm-based abstraction layer over underlying information stores such as databases and event logs. Specifically, it supports deadlines; complex events, including those based on aggregation; and norms that reference other norms. We prove important correctness properties for Custard, including stability (once an event has occurred, it has occurred forever) and safety (a query returns a finite set of tuples). Our compiler generates SQL queries from Custard specifications. Writing out such SQL queries by hand is tedious and error-prone even for simple norms, thus demonstrating Custard's practical benefits. |
Citation Key | AAMAS-16:Custard |