In resource-flow systems, e.g. production lines, agents are processing resources by applying capabilities to them in a given order. Such systems profit from self-organization as they become easier to manage and more robust against failures. This paper proposes a decentralized coordination process that restores a system’s functionality after a failure by propagating information about the error t...

Access Control is an important mechanism of information security. Role-Based Access Control is a famous access control approach with good flexibility. RBAC96 and ARBAC97 are classical RBAC models. The ARBAC97 model facilitates decentralized administration of RBAC. However, ARBAC97 has some shortcomings in the case of being used in an organization with autonomous subsidiaries. The member of an a...

The effective and reliable coordination of agent activities is a momentous problem for Multi–Agent System (MAS) developers. Particularly challenging is the decentralized coordination of agents that enables systems to exhibit self–organization. Natural phenomena typically serve as design metaphors and developers apply Decentralized Coordination Mechanisms (DCMs) that have been inferred from biol...

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, business conducted over the Internet (referred here as 'e-commerce'), with its dynamism, rapid growth, and high competitiveness, promises new avenues for the creation of wealth (Amit, Zott, 2001). Established firms are creating new online businesses, while new ventures are exploiting the opportunities the Internet provides. Moreover, since the emerg...

Ethereum contracts can be designed to function as fully decentralized applications called DAPPs. Many DAPPs have already been fielded, including an online marketplace, a role playing game, a prediction market, and an Internet service provider. Unfortunately, DAPPs can be hacked, and the assets they control can be stolen. A recent attack on an Ethereum decentralized application called The DAO de...

Despite efforts by the U.S. an its allies to debilitate the al-Qaeda organization in the eight years since the September 11 th terrorist attacks, al-Qaeda continues to operate and poses a national security threat to the U.S. Recent research indicates that part of alQaeda’s success hinges upon the organization’s ability to function in a decentralized manner. This paper analyzes alQaeda using the...

Decentralized reinforcement learning (DRL) has been applied to a number of distributed applications. However, one of the main challenges faced by DRL is its convergence. Previous work has shown that hierarchically organizational control is an effective way of coordinating DRL to improve its speed, quality, and likelihood of convergence. In this paper, we develop a distributed, negotiation-based...

In this paper, a discount model is proposed to coordinate pricing and ordering decisions in a two-echelon supply chain (SC). Demand is stochastic and price sensitive while lead times are fixed. Decentralized decision making where downstream decides on selling price and order size is investigated. Then, joint pricing and ordering decisions are extracted where both members act as a single entity ...

This paper analyzes the delegation of contracting capacity in a moral hazard environment with sequential production in a project which involves a principal and two agents. The agent in charge of the final production can obtain soft information about the other agent’s effort choice by investing in monitoring. I investigate the circumstances under which it is optimal for the principal to use a ce...