Promise theory

Promise Theory, in the context of information science, is a model of voluntary cooperation between individual, autonomous actors or agents who publish their intentions to one another in the form of promises. It is a form of labelled graph theory, describing discrete networks of agents joined by the unilateral promises they make.

A promise is a declaration of intent whose purpose is to increase the recipient's certainty about a claim of past, present or future behaviour. For a promise to increase certainty, the recipient needs to trust the promiser, but trust can also be built on the verification (or assessment) that previous promises have been kept, thus trust plays a symbiotic relationship with promises. Each agent assesses its belief in the promise's outcome or intent. Thus Promise Theory is about the of autonomous agents.

One of the goals of Promise Theory is to offer a model that unifies the physical (or dynamical) description of an information system with its intended meaning, i.e. its semantics. This has been used to describe configuration management of resources in information systems, amongst other things.

Promise Theory was proposed by Mark Burgess in 2004, in the context of computer science, in order to solve problems present in obligation-based computer management schemes for policy-based management. However its usefulness was quickly seen to go far beyond computing. The simple model of a promise used in Promise Theory (now called 'micro-promises') can easily address matters of Economics and Organization. Promise Theory has since been developed by Burgess in collaboration with Dutch computer scientist Jan Bergstra, resulting in a book: Promise Theory: Principles and Applications. published in 2013.

Interest in promise theory has grown in the IT industry, with several products citing it.

Obligations, rather than promises have been the traditional way of guiding behaviour. Promise Theory's point of departure from obligation logics is the idea that all agents in a system should have autonomy of control—i.e. that they cannot be coerced or forced into a specific behaviour. Obligation theories in computer science often view an obligation as a deterministic command that causes its proposed outcome. In Promise Theory an agent may only make promises about its own behaviour. For autonomous agents it is meaningless to make promises about another's behaviour.

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