Engineering norm-aware BDI agents

Michael Winikoff, Frank Dignum, Sebastian Rodriguez, John Thangarajah

Keywords: Norms, Norm-aware agents, Goal Plan Tree, Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI)

TL;DR: This paper defines an approach, including a step-by-step process, to engineering norm-aware BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) agents that handle key cases not covered by prior work, and that can be used with off-the-shelf BDI agent languages

Abstract: Norms are an important abstraction for multi-agent systems (MAS) because they specify _flexible constraints_. As constraints they help bring order to agent behaviour. However, being flexible, they can be violated, and thus do not over-constrain autonomous entities. In order to build MAS with cognitive agents that use norms we need to be able to engineer these agents to be _norm-aware_, i.e. being able to take norms into account in their reasoning. Such agents need to be able to: (1) decide to knowingly _violate_ a norm, understanding the consequences; (2) decide to _conform_ with a norm, which may require adapting its plans, e.g. adding extra steps; and (3) decide to change their choice of plan for a given goal, due to norm consequences. Existing work on norm-aware agents does not cover all these cases. Additionally, to support adoption, an approach to engineering norm-aware agents should be usable with existing agent-oriented programming languages. This paper defines an approach, including a step-by-step process, to engineering norm-aware BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) agents that handle these three cases and that can be used with off-the-shelf BDI agent languages.

Area: Engineering and Analysis of Multiagent Systems (EMAS)

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Submission Number: 658