Normative Conflicts that Depend on the Domain

Norms are being used in multi-agent systems as a powerful abstraction to capture social constraints. Norms regulate the behavior of the agents by describing the actions that can be performed, actions that must be performed, and actions that cannot be performed. One of the main challenges on design and implementation normative systems is that norms may conflict with one another. Although there are several works that contribute to the checking and solving conflicts between norms, there is still a need for approaches able to check for conflicts when such conflicts are only detected when analyzing the application domain. Without considering the application domain it is not possible to identify conflicts that, for instance, regulate the execution of different, but related actions, executed by different, but related entities. In this paper we present an approach that uses an ontology, which describes the application, when checking for conflicts between the norms.