Autonomous agents and social norms
Frank P. M. Dignum · TU/e Research Portal · 1996
In this paper we present concepts and their relations that are necessary for modeling autonomous agents in an environment that is governed by some (social) norms. We divide the norms over three levels: the private level the contract level and the convention level. We show how deontic logic can be used to model the concepts and how the theory of speech acts can be used to model the generation of (some of) the norms. Finally we give some idea about an agent architecture incorporating the social norms based on a BDI framework. 1 Introduction In the area of Multi-Agent Systems much research is devoted to the coordination of the agents. Many papers have been written about protocols (like Contract-Net) that allow agents to negotiate and cooperate (e.g. [13, 5]). Most of the cooperation between agents is based on the assumption that they have some joint goal or intention. Such a joint goal enforces some type of cooperative behaviour on all agents (see e.g. [4, 10, 20]). The conventions accor...