Abstract
Norms are used in open Multi-Agent Systems as a formal specification of deontic statements aimed at regulating the actions of agents and the interactions among them. In this paper, we propose a set of services facilitating the development of both non-normative and normative agents for norm-governed MAS. Specifically, we propose to provide agents with norm reasoning services. These services will help agent designers/developers to programme agents that consider norm reasoning without having to implement the needed mechanisms to reason about norms by themselves. This article shows how these services perform as well as the results of the experiments that we conducted to evaluate their performance.
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Notes
See (Savarimuthu and Cranefield 2009) for a review of works on the recognition of norms.
Note that the NRSs are a set of related functionalities provided to agents. Thus, NRSs cannot be modelled as agents since they are not autonomous goal-driven entities.
The lists and log files may be implemented as blackboards, a database that can be accessed by the NRSs, or simply as files that are shared with the NRSs.
Do not confuse with the mail boxes E In and E Out for receiving/sanding events.
Note that this is a simplification of the FIPA Request Interaction Protocol.
Note that the effect of the NJS on norm compliance depends on the enforcement actions that agents carry out when they are informed by the NJS about the fulfilment or violation of norms. The definition of sanctioning and rewarding systems is out of the scope of this paper. For this reason, the NJS has not been considered in the experiments.
For simplicity we assume that there is a perfect execution of actions: i.e., agents never fail when they perform actions.
Note that in this experiment there is one norm-autonomous agent and it is only affected by a subset of the norms. However, when there is more than one norm-autonomous agent, then the number of events sent to these agents is higher than the number of events that is sent to the NM. This can be observed in the following experiments.
Notice that there is only one norm-autonomus agent which is affected by a subset of norms and, as a consequence, only the events that determine the activation and expiration of this subset of norms is sent to it. In contrast, the NM receives events that determine the activation and expiration of all norms.
Norm-reasoning agents could also consider all norms as not active. However, we have not chosen this alternative since they would behave again as norm-unaware
Note that implementations of proposals made by Felicíssimo et al., Okuyama et al. and Piunti et al. are not available and we cannot evaluate the performance of these implementations. Thus, we have implemented a simulator that computes the number of norms that are complied by agents when they receive the normative information that is described by the algorithms specified by Felicíssimo et al., Okuyama et al. and Piunti et al.
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Acknowledgments
Natalia Criado was awarded a FPU scholarship AP-2007-01256 by the spanish government. This work has also been partially funded by grants CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00022, TIN2009-13839-C03-01. This research has also been partially funded by Valencian Prometeo project 2008/051.