Programming norm-aware agents

Normative organisations provide a means to coordinate the activities of individual agents in multiagent settings. The coordination is realized at run time by creating obligations and prohibitions (norms) for individual agents. If an agent cannot meet an obligation or violates a prohibition, the organisation imposes a sanction on the agent. In this paper, we consider norm-aware agents that deliberate on their goals, norms and sanctions before deciding which plan to select and execute. A norm-aware agent is able to violate norms (accepting the resulting sanctions) if it is in the agent’s overall interests to do so, e.g., if meeting an obligation would result in an important goal of the agent becoming unachievable. Programming norm-aware agents in conventional BDI-based agent programming languages is difficult, as they lack support for deliberating about goals, norms, sanctions and deadlines. We present the norm-aware agent programming language N-2APL. N-2APL is based on 2APL and provides support for beliefs, goals, plans, norms, sanctions and deadlines. We give the syntax and semantics of N-2APL, and show that N-2APL agents are rational in the sense of committing to a set of plans that will achieve the agent’s most important goals and obligations by their deadlines while respecting its most important prohibitions.