Normative rational agents - A BDI approach

This paper proposes an approach on how to accommodate norms to an already existing architecture of rational agents. Starting from the famous BDI model, an extension of the BDI execution loop will be presented; it will address such issues as norm instantiation and norm internalization, with a particular emphasis on the problem of norm consistency. A proposal for the resolution of conflicts between newly occurring norms, on one side, and already existing norms or mental states, on the other side, will be described. While it is fairly difficult to imagine an evaluation for the proposed architecture, a challenging scenario inspired form the science-fiction literature will be used to give the reader an intuition of how the proposed approach will deal with situations of normative conflicts.