Detection and resolution of normative conflicts in multi-agent systems : a literature survey

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A Framework for Normative MultiAgent Organisations

The social and organisational aspects of agency have led to a good amount of theoretical work in terms of formal models and theories. From these different works normative multiagent systems and multiagent organisations are particularily considered in this paper. Embodying such models and theories in the conception and engineering of proper infrastructures that achieve requirements of openness and adaptation, is still an open issue. In this direction, this paper presents and discusses a framework for normative multiagent organisations. Based on the Agents and Artifacts meta-model (A&A), it introduces organisational artifacts as first class entities to instrument the normative organisation for supporting agents activities within it

Contract Formation through Preemptive Normative Conflict Resolution

Publisher PD

Governance of Autonomous Agents on the Web: Challenges and Opportunities

International audienceThe study of autonomous agents has a long tradition in the Multiagent System and the Semantic Web communities, with applications ranging from automating business processes to personal assistants. More recently, the Web of Things (WoT), which is an extension of the Internet of Things (IoT) with metadata expressed in Web standards, and its community provide further motivation for pushing the autonomous agents research agenda forward. Although representing and reasoning about norms, policies and preferences is crucial to ensuring that autonomous agents act in a manner that satisfies stakeholder requirements, normative concepts, policies and preferences have yet to be considered as first-class abstractions in Web-based multiagent systems. Towards this end, this paper motivates the need for alignment and joint research across the Multiagent Systems, Semantic Web, and WoT communities, introduces a conceptual framework for governance of autonomous agents on the Web, and identifies several research challenges and opportunities

08361 Abstracts Collection -- Programming Multi-Agent Systems

From 31th August to 5th September, the Dagstuhl Seminar 08361 ``Programming Multi-Agent Systems\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Multi-Agents Systems and Territory: Concepts, Methods and Applications

This paper analyses the multi-agents systems that are now considered the best tool to simulate and study real world. We review the main characteristics of a multi-agents system, namely interactions and cooperations of agents, communications and behaviours between them and finally the schedule of actions and jobs assignment to agents. The multi-agents system approach is increasingly applied in social and economic sciences; so we study mainly the territorial applications. In these applications new characteristics arise from the consideration of territory (land and space where the agents live or territory as an agent in itself, that evolves in the time). We study possible new applications of multi-agents applied to the territory (for instance, to define town planning policies or to locate dangerous facilities). Furthermore we study new tools to make operational multi-agents systems (mainly Swarm, the toolkit of Santa Fe Institute). With Swarm we present two kind of territorial applications: with located agents (fixed in space) and with not located agents (moving in the space). Finally we show the results of these applications.

Using the event calculus for tracking the normative state of contracts

In this work, we have been principally concerned with the representation of contracts so that their normative state may be tracked in an automated fashion over their deployment lifetime. The normative state of a contract, at a particular time, is the aggregation of instances of normative relations that hold between contract parties at that time, plus the current values of contract variables. The effects of contract events on the normative state of a contract are specified using an XML formalisation of the Event Calculus, called ecXML. We use an example mail service agreement from the domain of web services to ground the discussion of our work. We give a characterisation of the agreement according to the normative concepts of: obligation, power and permission, and show how the ecXML representation may be used to track the state of the agreement, according to a narrative of contract events. We also give a description of a state tracking architecture, and a contract deployment tool, both of which have been implemented in the course of our work.