Agent reasoning for norm compliance: a semantic approach

  • Authors:

  • M. Birna van Riemsdijk;Louise A. Dennis;Michael Fisher;Koen V. Hindriks

  • Affiliations:

  • Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands;University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom;University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom;Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

A system of autonomous agents may exhibit undesirable or ineffective behavior if no form of regulation is imposed. Norms, describing how agents should ideally behave, can be used to address this issue if agents are able to reason about norms and adapt their behavior to comply with them (if they choose to do so). Assuming that which norms will have to be followed is unknown at design time, it is not possible to pre-program agents such that their behavior is norm compliant. Instead, we need a generic execution mechanism that allows agents to adapt their behavior at run-time, which is what we propose in this paper. The execution mechanism is defined on top of an abstract agent decision making mechanism. This is done by allowing the execution of actions by the agent decision making mechanism only if these are not forbidden according to norms, as well as triggering the execution of actions if this is required by norms. We specify norms using Linear Temporal Logic and define the operational semantics of the execution mechanism using techniques from executable temporal logic. We formally analyze properties of the execution mechanism, including norm compliance.