Towards Norm Entrepreneurship in Agent Societies

Amritha Menon Anavankot, Stephen Cranefield, Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu

Abstract: One of the principal focuses of normative multi-agent systems in a distributed environment is coordination among agents. Most work in this area has studied norms that are provided to agents as part of their specification or distributed from centralized agents. Diverging from this line of thought, we focus on peer-to-peer interaction by providing the agents with the freedom to initiate norm creation in demanding situations like a potential interference. To achieve this, we blend probabilistic planning with norms in a multi-agent system and investigate the notion of norm entrepreneurship. A common approach in prior work is to reduce an interference coordination problem to a simple game theory model involving the simultaneous performance of a single action by each agent. Instead, in our work a norm entrepreneur proposes a local coordination plan (potential norm) which is a sequence of actions from each agent to cope with an interference in their normal course of action. This work will also investigate how proposed local coordination plans can be propagated to form norms at a later stage.