Social norms are powerful formalism in coordinating autonomous agents' behaviour to achieve certain objectives. In this paper, we propose a dynamic normative system to enable the reasoning of the changes of norms under different circumstances, which cannot be done in the existing static normative systems. We study two important problems (norm synthesis and norm recognition) related to the autonomy of the entire system and the agents, and characterise the computational complexities of solving these problems.
Changes of normative system. @cite_0 represents the norms as a set of atomic propositions and then employs a language to specify the update of norms. Although the updates are parameterised over actions, no considerations are taken to investigate, by either verification or norm synthesis, whether the normative system can be imposed to coordinate agents' behaviour to secure the objectives of the system.
@cite_0
1703978911 321389052 2141573378 2067743023
Normative systems (norms) have been widely proposed as a technique for coordinating multi-agent systems. The automated synthesis of norms for coordination remains an open and complex problem, which we tackle in this paper. We propose a novel mechanism called IRON (Intelligent Robust On-line Norm synthesis mechanism), for the on-line synthesis of norms. IRON aims to synthesise conflict-free norms without lapsing into over-regulation. Thus, IRON produces norms that characterise necessary conditions for coordination, without over-regulation. In addition to defining the norm synthesis problem formally, we empirically show that IRON is capable of synthesising norms that are effective even in the presence of non-compliance behaviours in a system. The use of normative systems is widely accepted as an effective approach to control and regulate the behaviour of agents in multi-agent systems. When norms are added to a normative system, the behaviour of such a system changes. As of yet, there is no clear formal methodology to model the dynamics of a normative system under addition of various types of norms. In this paper we view the addition of a norm as an update of a normative system, and we provide update semantics to model this process. In this paper we are concerned with the analysis of normative conflicts, or the detection of conflicting obligations, permissions and prohibitions in normative texts written in a Controlled Natural Language (CNL). For this we present AnaCon, a proof-of-concept system where normative texts written in CNL are automatically translated into the formal language CL using the Grammatical Framework (GF). Such CL expressions are then analysed for normative conflicts by the CLAN tool, which gives counter-examples in cases where conflicts are found. The framework also uses GF to give a CNL version of the counter-example, helping the user to identify the conflicts in the original text. We detail the application of AnaCon to two case studies and discuss the effectiveness of our approach. Normative systems are traditionally described and analyzed using deontic logic, describing the logical relations among obligations and permissions. However, there is still a gap between deontic logic and normative multi-agent systems such as electronic institutions, which may be seen as an instance of the gap between on the one hand logical agent specification languages and on the other hand agent architectures and programming languages. To bridge the gap, in this paper we propose an architecture containing separate subsystems or components for counts-as conditionals, conditional obligations and conditional permissions. We add a norm database component in which the three kinds of rules are stored, and we use a channel based coordination model to describe the relations among the four normative components.