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Towards the Norm-Aware Agent: Bridging the Gap Between Deontic Specifications and Practical Mechanisms for Norm Monitoring and Norm-Aware Planning

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Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems IX (COIN 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8386))

Abstract

In the agents’ literature, norms have been studied from multiple perspectives, but while formalisations tend to be disconnected from possible implementations due to the lack of differentiation between abstract norm and norm instantiation, on the other hand implementations tend to be weak groundings of deontic logics, tightly coupled to one particular implementation domain. Furthermore, different formalisations are typically used for norm enforcement and norm reasoning. In this paper we report on our attempt to bridge this gap by reducing from deontic statements to structural operational semantics (for norm monitoring) and to planning control rules (for practical normative reasoning). We hint at the feasibility of the translation of these semantics to actual implementation languages (Clojure and Drools for norm monitoring and TLPlan for norm-aware planning). Finally we discuss the limitations of our approach and suggest some improvements and future lines of research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the rest of the paper we will use the term norms or regulative norms to refer to Searle’s regulative rules.

  2. 2.

    In this paper, we will denote such identified norms as norm instances.

  3. 3.

    Please note that we assume the deactivation condition to eventually happen.

  4. 4.

    The timeout condition is evaluated as starting at the point of time of violation.

  5. 5.

    Each time there is an infraction the fine has to be paid, still, for reasons of simplicity we use a predicate that keeps no track of the different violations

  6. 6.

    In some works in the literature, this is interpreted as “given \(B\) and as long as \(B\) happens, \(A\) should happen”, while in other works it is interpreted in a closer way to our reading

  7. 7.

    http://planning.cis.strath.ac.uk/competition/

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the European funded projects IT-ALIVE (PF-215890) and SUPER HUB (PF-289067). The content of this paper however solely reflect the opinion of the authors, and does not necessarily represent the views of the European Commission.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTECH, Edifici Omega, Despatx 206-207 C/ Jordi Girona Salgado 1-3, 08034, Barcelona, Spain

    Sofia Panagiotidi, Sergio Alvarez-Napagao & Javier Vázquez-Salceda

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  1. Sofia Panagiotidi
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  2. Sergio Alvarez-Napagao
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  3. Javier Vázquez-Salceda
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Correspondence to Sofia Panagiotidi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom

    Tina Balke

  2. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Frank Dignum

  3. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    M. Birna van Riemsdijk

  4. Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom

    Amit K. Chopra

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Panagiotidi, S., Alvarez-Napagao, S., Vázquez-Salceda, J. (2014). Towards the Norm-Aware Agent: Bridging the Gap Between Deontic Specifications and Practical Mechanisms for Norm Monitoring and Norm-Aware Planning. In: Balke, T., Dignum, F., van Riemsdijk, M., Chopra, A. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems IX. COIN 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8386. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07314-9_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07314-9_19

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