Constraints on computational agents' behaviour are studied both in work on policy- governed systems|usually as part of work on security or policy-based management in dis- tributed software engineering|and also in multi-agent systems research, where the terminol- ogy is generally one of `norms' and concepts drawn from deontic logic. Interaction between these treatments, and the research communities that study them, has not been as thorough as it might, for though the perpectives, methods and interests are sometimes di erent, there is a great deal of shared ground. In the current research report, we present a language and tools which can be used for reasoning about and studying the operation of both norms and policies on a multi-agent, or distributed, system. The language is based on one member, C+, of a family of knowledge representation formalisms studied in AI. We describe the types of domains that can be represented, the kinds of analysis tasks that are possible, and describe our current implementation (which is freely available for download). Future directions for this work are described
