Acting on Norm Constrained Plans

The behaviour of deliberative agents is often guided by a plan library designed to achieve goals given certain environmental conditions. Plans in these plan libraries are designed to achieve individual goals, and cannot possibly account for all possible variations of restrictions in the societies within which these agents must operate. These restrictions, captured through norms, include obligations, prohibitions, and permissions. Unlike traditional planning restrictions, norms can often be contradictory and impossible to achieve simultaneously, necessitating some form of compromise. In this paper we describe a technique for taking norms into consideration when deciding how to execute a plan. Our norms are constraint based, allowing for fine-grained control over actions. Our technique allows for reasoning about the interactions between norms, and resolves conflict by selecting actions where the cost of violating one set of norms is outweighed by the reward obtained in complying with another.