Promise Theory - Emergent Behaviour

Emergent Behaviour

In computer science, the Promise theory describes policy governed services, in a framework of completely autonomous agents, which assist one another by voluntary cooperation alone. It is a framework for analyzing realistic models of modern networking, and as a formal model for swarm intelligence.

Promise theory may be viewed as a logical and graph theoretical framework for understanding complex relationships in networks, where many constraints have to be met, which was developed at Oslo University College, by drawing on ideas from several different lines of research conducted there, including policy based management, graph theory, logic and configuration management. It uses a constructivist approach that builds conventional management structures from graphs of interacting, autonomous agents. Promises can be asserted either from an agent to itself or from one agent to another and each promise implies a constraint on the behavior of the promising agent. The atomicity of the promises makes them a tool for finding contradictions and inconsistencies.