A Methodology for Formalizing Different Types of Norms

Soheil Roshankish, Nicoletta Fornara

Abstract: In a world where many activities are carried out digitally, it is increasingly urgent to be able to formally represent the rules, norms, and policies that regulate these activities. In multi-agent systems, formalizing policies written in a natural language into a formal model, making them machine-readable, is a demanding task. In this paper, we introduce a methodology to help people to understand the fundamental elements that they should consider for this transformation. In this paper we will focus mainly on a methodology for formalizing norms using the T-Norm norm model, this because it allows us to express a rich set of different types of norms. In any case, the proposed methodology is general enough to also be used, in some of its steps, to formalize norms using other formal languages. This is an important issue because since there is not yet a set of different types of norms that is sufficiently expressive and is recognized as valid by the NorMAS community, papers presenting a given model usually do not explicitly state which types of norms can be expressed with that model and which cannot. Therefore, the second goal of this paper is to propose and discuss a rich set of norm types that could be used to study the expressive power of different formal models of norms and to compare them.