Legal and ethical implications of applications based on agreement technologies: the case of auction-based road intersections

• Published in: Artificial intelligence and law Vol. 28; no. 4; pp. 385 - 414
• Main Authors: Santos, José-Antonio, Fernández, Alberto, Moreno-Rebato, Mar, Billhardt, Holger, Rodríguez-García, José-A., Ossowski, Sascha
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.12.2020; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Agreements; Artificial Intelligence; Auctions; Computer Science; Ethical aspects; Ethics; Information Storage and Retrieval; Intellectual Property; Intelligent systems; IT Law; Legal Aspects of Computing; Legislation; Media Law; Philosophy of Law; Road construction; Smart cities; Smart roads; Social networks; Software agents; Technology and civilization; Traffic intersections; Agreement technologies; Spanish law; Intersection management; Ethical and legal aspects; Autonomous vehicles; Intelligent transportation systems
• ISSN: 0924-8463; 1572-8382
• DOI: 10.1007/s10506-019-09259-8

Agreement technologies refer to a novel paradigm for the construction of distributed intelligent systems, where autonomous software agents negotiate to reach agreements on behalf of their human users. Smart Cities are a key application domain for agreement technologies. While several proofs of concept and prototypes exist, such systems are still far from ready for being deployed in the real-world. In this paper we focus on a novel method for managing elements of smart road infrastructures of the future, namely the case of auction-based road intersections. We show that, even though the key technological elements for such methods are already available, there are multiple non-technical issues that need to be tackled before they can be applied in practice. For this purpose, we analyse legal and ethical implications of auction-based road intersections in the context of international regulations and from the standpoint of the Spanish legislation. From this exercise, we extract a set of required modifications, of both technical and legal nature, which need to be addressed so as to pave the way for the potential real-world deployment of such systems in a future that may not be too far away.