Governing multi-agent systems

in order to cope with the heterogeneity, autonomy and diversity of interests among the different agents in open multi-agent systems, several governance mechanisms have been defined. governance mechanism enforce the behavior of agents by establishing a set of norms that describe actions that agents are prohibited, permitted or obligated to do. in this paper we present a governance mechanism that enforces not only dialogical actions but also non-dialogical ones. although several governance mechanisms have been proposed, none of them satisfactorily deals with non-dialogical actions. our proposed mechanism is based on testimonies provided by agents about the behavior of other agents. the governance mechanism provides decisions pointing out if norms have been violated or if false testimonies have been supplied. the decisions are based not only on testimonies and depositions provided by the agents but also on the agents？ reputations supplied by a reputation system that is part of the mechanism.