Utilizing Permission Norms in BDI Practical Normative Reasoning

Norms have been used in multiagent systems as a standard description of agents’ behaviors. Much effort has been put in formalizing norms and utilizing them in agent decision making with such work often focusing on two types of norms: prohibitions and obligations. However, agents may have incomplete knowledge about norms in a system for several reasons, such as, deficient norms identification techniques or because norms are not fixed and they may change and emerge. In this work we argue that, by assuming that agents do not have complete knowledge of the norms within a system, permission norms are fundamental for modeling unknown normative states. Using Event Calculus, we propose a formal representation of permission norm and show how to use it in agent normative practical reasoning. A simple mineral mining scenario has been used to demonstrate our work, which was implemented in a popular agent programming language.