Abstract
Norms, that is, obligations, prohibitions and permissions, are useful abstractions to facilitate coordination in open, heterogeneous multi-agent systems. We observe a lack of distributed architectures and non-centralised computational models for norms. We propose a model, viz., normative structures, to regulate the behaviour of autonomous agents taking part in simultaneous and possibly related activities within a multi-agent system. This artifact allows the propagation of normative positions (that is, the obligations, prohibitions and permissions associated to individual agents) as a consequence of agents’ actions. Within a normative structure, conflicts may arise – one same action can be simultaneousely forbidden and obliged/permitted. This is due to the concurrent and dynamic nature of agents’ interactions in a multi-agent system. However, ensuring conflict freedom of normative structures at design time is computationally intractable, and thus real-time conflict resolution is required: our architecture support the distributed management of normative positions, including conflict detection and resolution.
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García-Camino, A., Rodríguez-Aguilar, J.A., Vasconcelos, W. (2008). A Distributed Architecture for Norm Management in Multi-Agent Systems. In: Sichman, J.S., Padget, J., Ossowski, S., Noriega, P. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems III. COIN 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4870. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79003-7_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79003-7_20
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