Agents That Work in Harmony by Knowing and Fullling Their Obligations

Societies constrain the behavior of agents by imposing multiple, often contradictory, obligations and interdic-tions amongst them. To work in harmony, agents must nd ways to satisfy these constraints, or to break less important ones when necessary. In this paper 1 , we present a solution to this problem based on a representation of obligations and interdictions in an organizational framework, together with an inference method that also decides which obligations to break in contradictory situations. These are integrated in an operational , practically useful agent development language that covers the spectrum from deening organizations, roles, agents, obligations, goals, conversations to inferring and executing coordinated agent behaviors in multi-agent applications. One strength of the approach is the way it supports negotiation by exchanging de-ontic constraints amongst agents. We illustrate this and the entire system with a negotiated solution to the feature interaction problem in the telecommunications industry.