N-Jason: Run-Time Norm Compliance in AgentSpeak(L)

Normative systems offer a means to govern agent behaviour in dynamic open environments. Under the governance, agents themselves must be able to reason about compliance with stateor event-based norms (or both) depending upon the formalism used. This paper describes how norm awareness enables a BDI agent to exhibit norm compliant behaviour at run-time taking into account normative factors. To this end, we propose N-Jason, a run-time norm compliant BDI agent framework supporting norm-aware deliberation as well as run-time norm execution mechanism, through which new unknown norms are recognised and bring about the triggering of plans. To be able to process a norm such as an obligation, the agent architecture must be able to deal with deadlines and priorities, and choose between plans triggered by a particular norm. Consequently, we extend the syntax and the scheduling algorithm of AgentSpeak(RT) to operate in the context of Jason/AgentSpeak(L) and provide ‘real-time agency’, which we explain through a detailed examination of the operational semantics of a single reasoning cycle.