Contract Formation through Preemptive Normative Conflict Resolution

Publisher PD

Distributed norm management in regulated multiagent systems

Norms are widely recognised as a means of coordinating multi-agent systems. The distributed management of norms is a challenging issue and we observe a lack of truly distributed computational realisations of normative models. In order to regulate the behaviour of autonomous agents that take part in multiple, related activities, we propose a normative model, the Normative Structure (NS), an artifact that is based on the propagation of normative positions (obligations, prohibitions, permissions), as consequences of agents’ actions. Within a NS, conflicts may arise due to the dynamic nature of the MAS and the concurrency of agents ’ actions. However, ensuring conflict-freedom of a NS at design time is computationally intractable. We show this by formalising the notion of conflict, providing a mapping of NSs into Coloured Petri Nets and borrowing well-known theoretical results from that field. Since online conflict resolution is required, we present a tractable algorithm to be employed distributedly. We then demonstrate that this algorithm is paramount for the distributed enactment of a NS

A distributed architecture for norm-aware agent societies

Abstract. We introduce a distributed architecture to endow multi-agent systems with a social layer in which norms are explicitly represented and managed via rules. We propose a class of rules (called institutional rules) that operate on a database of facts (called institutional states) representing the state of affairs of a multi-agent system. We define the syntax and semantics of the institutional rules and describe a means to implement them as a logic program. We show how the institutional rules and states come together in a distributed architecture in which a team of administrative agents employ a tuple space (i.e., a kind of blackboard system) to guide the execution of a multi-agent system.