1. 25th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering
June 17-21, 2013, Valencia, Spain
Ognjen Scekic, Hong-Linh Truong, Schahram Dustdar
Distributed Systems Group
Vienna University of Technology
http://dsg.tuwien.ac.at
Programming Incentives
in Information Systems

2. 2 CAiSE’13
Evolution of Collaborative Processes
Conventional workflows
• formal description
• structured execution
• predefined roles and activities
• complex tasks
Crowdsourcing
• simple tasks
• anonymous replaceable actors
• short, unstructured interactions
• No interaction/collaboration
among actors
+
=
Socio-technical Collective Adaptive System
• ad-hoc assembled teams
• complex tasks
• social orchestration
• indirect adaptation

3. 3 CAiSE’13
 Programmable incentive
management
 Requirements:
– Modeling
– Programming
– Execution
– Monitoring
– Re-use
Incentive Programming Model for CASs
 EU FP7 SmartSociety project
www.smart-society-project.eu

4. 4 CAiSE’13
Incentives & Rewards
• Incentives
Stimulate (motivate) or discourage
certain worker activities before the
actual execution of those activities.
• Rewards
Any kind of recompense for worthy
services rendered or retribution for
wrongdoing exerted upon workers
after the completion of activity.
• Incentive Mechanism
A plan (rule) for assigning rewards.

5. 5 CAiSE’13
 We identified 7 basic
incentive mechanisms in use
today and their constituent
elements.
 New mechanisms can be built
by composing and
customizing well-known
incentive elements.
 Portable, reusable, scalable
Modeling Incentives

6. 6 CAiSE’13
Executing Incentives

7. 7 CAiSE’13
PRogrammable INCentives Framework (PRINC)
Representation of external system suitable for modeling application of
incentives.
• State – Global state, individual worker attributes and performance metrics
(QoS).
• Time – Records of past and future worker interactions supporting time
conditions.
• Structure – Representation and manipulation of various types of relationships
Rewarding
Model
(RMod)

8. 8 CAiSE’13
 Examples of mechanisms that RMod can encode and
execute:
− At the end of iteration, award each worker who scored better
than the average score of his immediate neighbors.
− Unless the productivity increases to a level p
within n next iterations, replace team's current manager
with the most-trusted of his subordinate workers.
The Rewarding Model (RMod)

9. 9 CAiSE’13
PRINC Framework
• Definition of system-specific artifacts, actions, attributes and
relation types.
• Definition and parameterization of
metrics, messages, structural patterns and custom incentive
mechanisms.
Mapping
Model
(MMod)

10. 10 CAiSE’13
The Mapping Model (MMod)
 Example: Adapting a general incentive mechanism for a software testing
company.
DSL
When a bug
report is
verified, award
points to the
submitter.
library

11. 11 CAiSE’13
PRINC Framework
• Declarative, domain-specific language.
• High-level, platform independent, human-friendly
notation.
Incentive
Model
(IMod)

12. 12 CAiSE’13
 We do not invent nor evaluate incentive mechanisms.
 Basic techniques, such as composition of mechanisms
evaluated through simulation:
 DomainPro1 tool
Evaluation
1 http://quandarypeak.com/

13. 13 CAiSE’13
 Functional evaluation of RMod prototype.
 e.g. structural incentive mechanism rotating presidency.
Evaluation
internal rule representation
1.
2.
3.

14. 14 CAiSE’13
 Functional evaluation
 Encoding real-world incentive schemes, e.g., lottery and
shares
 Locationary.com
Evaluation

15. 15 CAiSE’13
 Conclusions:
– Socio-technical systems need effective incentive management.
– We presented a framework for
modeling, composing, adapting, executing and monitoring
portable incentive strategies.
 Current work:
– High-level, user-friendly, graphical DSL.
– Integration into the overall programming model for CASs.
 Future Work:
– Determine best incentive practices in a given environment
by learning from past incentive applications.
Conclusion & Future Work

16. 25th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering
June 17-21, 2013, Valencia, Spain
Ognjen Scekic, Hong-Linh Truong, Schahram Dustdar
Distributed Systems Group
Vienna University of Technology
http://dsg.tuwien.ac.at
Modeling Rewards and Incentive Mechanisms for Social BPM
Thank you!
Questions?