An Architectural Model for Autonomous Normative Agents

Abstract

Social norms have become one of the most promising approaches that use an informal social control to ensure a desirable social order in open multi-agent systems. In these systems, autonomous and heterogeneous entities work towards similar or different goals. Norms regulate the behaviour of agents by defining obligations and prohibitions, and by creating rewards and penalties to encourage the agents to meet theses constraints. The development of autonomous normative agents, i. e., agents able to take decisions by following their motivations related to their goals and taking into account the system norms, has proven to be significantly more challenging than the design of traditional agents. In this paper, we introduce an architectural model that provides a set of functions to support the agent on the reasoning about the norms. These operations assist the agent to perceive the system’s norms, detect the fulfillment and violation of the norms while verifying their activation and deactivation, select the norms the agent intends to fulfill, identify and overcome conflicts among norms.