Abstract
Norms have been used to represent desirable behaviours that software agents should exhibit in sophisticated multi-agent solutions. An important open research issue refers to group norms, i.e. norms that govern groups of agents. Depending on the interpretation, group norms may be intended to affect the group as a whole, each member of a group, or some members of the group. Moreover, upholding group norms may require coordination among the members of the group. We have identified three sets of agents affected by group norms, namely, (i) the addressees of the norm, (ii) those that will act on it, and (iii) those that are responsible to ensure norm compliance. We present a formalism to represent these, connecting it to a minimalist agent organisation model. We use our formalism to develop a reasoning mechanism which enables agents to identify their position with respect to a group norm, so as to further support agent autonomy and coordination when deciding on possible courses of action.
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Notes
- 1.
We explain in Sect. 3.2 how we differentiate collective and individual actions.
- 2.
More realistically, the stakeholders and components have means to relate their knowledge bases (or, to re-phrase this in more modern terms, “align their ontologies”), thus being able to map their knowledge representation on to that of other parties.
- 3.
It is important to notice that the pre-conditions of an action may contain negated propositions, but not the post-conditions. We present in Sect. 3.1 an operational semantics showing how agents performing actions update a global state of computation.
- 4.
During the enactment of an organisation (run-time) each agent adopts a sub-set of roles. If the power relation has any loop then there is potential for loops when agents (acting in different roles) are delegating. By detecting/flagging loops in the power relation at design time we are warning designers about such potential loops in delegation at run-time. More sophisticated representations for roles [10, 14, 35] addressing features such as “at most one agent should be in this role” (cardinality of a role) and “whomever takes up this role cannot take up this other role” (compatibility of roles), could avoid certain combinations of roles, thus partitioning the graph of roles (vertices) and power relations (edges) into sub-graphs without loops.
- 5.
This means that propositions are not implicitly recorded in (copied onto) the next state; a proposition will only be copied from one state onto the next state if it appears both in the pre- and post-conditions of an action.
- 6.
Collective actions have large sets of post-conditions reflecting the “effort” to be spent in order to achieve them. By breaking apart an action into other (simpler) actions which together achieve the same effects (post-conditions) we capture the delegation process supported by the power relation, and which is explored in our reasoning mechanisms.
- 7.
For simplicity, we omit deadlines/periods of norms in our mechanisms, and the assumption is that the input norm is currently active, that is, its deadline/period has not expired and hence it must be considered. This assumption can be relaxed, but all algorithms should initially check whether or not the norm is still active.
- 8.
This amounts to finding all minimal coalition of agents who can achieve \(\varphi \) collectively [1].
- 9.
We illustrate this with a norm (without the groups) \(\mathbf {O} liftTable \) and axiom \(( liftEndA \,\wedge \, liftEndB )\leftrightarrow liftTable \), which gives rise to \(\mathbf {O} LiftEndA \wedge \mathbf {O} LiftEndB \).
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Aldewereld, H., Dignum, V., Vasconcelos, W. (2016). Reasoning with Group Norms in Software Agent Organisations. In: Dignum, V., Noriega, P., Sensoy, M., Sichman, J. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems XI. COIN 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9628. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42691-4_1
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