Reflection and Norms: Towards a Method for Dynamic Adaptation for MAS

The design of self-organizing systems and particular multiagent systems (MAS) is a non trivial task. On the one hand the particular system should show a dynamic behavior according to its environment, to gain a central advantage of distributed systems, on the other hand it has to act on behalf of its user and the final results have to possess acceptable quality. Especially the quality of the overall system’s behavior can become a critical issue, if the subsystems have their own objectives they have to optimize. In this paper we present a methodology that can be integrated into MAS for adapting their behavior allowing local optimization while respecting an acceptable level of the system’s global goals.