Introduction to normative multiagent systems

This article introduces the research issues related to and definition of normative multiagent systems. It also describes the papers selected from NorMAS05 that are part of this double special issue and relates the papers to each other

An Approach to Operationalize Regulative Norms in Multiagent Systems

International audienc

The Current State of Normative Agent-Based Systems

Recent years have seen an increase in the application of ideas from the social sciences to computational systems. Nowhere has this been more pronounced than in the domain of multiagent systems. Because multiagent systems are composed of multiple individual agents interacting with each other many parallels can be drawn to human and animal societies. One of the main challenges currently faced in multiagent systems research is that of social control. In particular, how can open multiagent systems be configured and organized given their constantly changing structure? One leading solution is to employ the use of social norms. In human societies, social norms are essential to regulation, coordination, and cooperation. The current trend of thinking is that these same principles can be applied to agent societies, of which multiagent systems are one type. In this article, we provide an introduction to and present a holistic viewpoint of the state of normative computing (computational solutions that employ ideas based on social norms.) To accomplish this, we (1) introduce social norms and their application to agent-based systems; (2) identify and describe a normative process abstracted from the existing research; and (3) discuss future directions for research in normative multiagent computing. The intent of this paper is to introduce new researchers to the ideas that underlie normative computing and survey the existing state of the art, as well as provide direction for future research.Norms, Normative Agents, Agents, Agent-Based System, Agent-Based Simulation, Agent-Based Modeling

Mapping Deontic Operators to Abductive Expectations

Deontic concepts and operators have been widely used in several fields where representation of norms is needed, including legal reasoning and normative multi-agent systems. The EU-funded SOCS project has provided a language to specify the agent interaction in open multi-agent systems. The language is equipped with a declarative semantics based on abductive logic programming, and an operational semantics consisting of a (sound and complete) abductive proof procedure. In the SOCS framework, the specification is used directly as a program for the verification procedure. In this paper, we propose a mapping of the usual deontic operators (obligations, prohibition, permission) to language entities, called expectations, available in the SOCS social framework. Although expectations and deontic operators can be quite different from a philosophical viewpoint, we support our mapping by showing a similarity between the abductive semantics for expectations and the Kripke semantics that can be given to deontic operators. The main purpose of this work is to make the computational machinery from the SOCS social framework available for the specification and verification of systems by means of deontic operators

Mapping deontic operators to abductive expectations

A number of approaches to agent society modeling can be found in the Multi-Agent Systems literature which exploit (variants of) Deontic Logic. In this paper, after briefly mentioning related approaches, we focus on the Computational Logic (CL) approach for society modeling developed within the UE IST-2001-32530 Project (named SOCS), where obligations and prohibitions are mapped into abducible predicates (respectively, positive and negative expectations), and norms ruling the behavior of members are represented as abductive integrity constraints. We discuss how this abductive framework can deal with Deontic Logic concepts, by introducing additional integrity constraints

Mapping Deontic Operators to Abductive Expectations

Deontic concepts and operators have been widely used in several fields where representation of norms is needed, including legal reasoning and normative multi-agent systems. The EU-funded SOCS project has provided a language to specify the agent interaction in open multi-agent systems. The language is equipped with a declarative semantics based on abductive logic programming, and an operational semantics consisting of a (sound and complete) abductive proof procedure. In the SOCS framework, the specification is used directly as a program for the verification procedure. In this paper, we propose a mapping of the usual deontic operators (obligations, prohibition, permission) to language entities, called expectations, available in the SOCS social framework. Although expectations and deontic operators can be quite different from a philosophical viewpoint, we support our mapping by showing a similarity between the abductive semantics for expectations and the Kripke semantics that can be given to deontic operators. The main purpose of this work is to make the computational machinery from the SOCS social framework available for the specification and verification of systems by means of deontic operators