We present an approach to social reasoning that integrates prior work on norms and obligations with the BDI approach to agent architectures. Norms and obligations can be used to increase the eficiency of agent reasoning, and their explicit representation supports reasoning about a wide range of behaviour types in a single framework. We propose a modified BDI interpreter loop that takes norms an...

Obligations are pervasive in modern systems, often linked to access control decisions. We present a very general model of obligations as objects with state, and discuss its interaction with a program’s execution. We describe several analyses that the model enables, both static (for verification) and dynamic (for monitoring). This includes a systematic approach to approximating obligations for e...

In this paper, we propose a model in which a formal characterization of obligations is used to constrain BDI agents to a socially eecient behavior in connictual 2x2 games. This model shows how obligations can play the role of providing incentives for self interested agents. The presence of a third BDI agent ensures the respect of obligations so that the parties behave in a socially eecient way.

Defining and enforcing obligations are key aspects of privacy protection. Most of today’s access control and data handling languages recognize the importance of obligations and even provide extension points but lack concrete language constructs to actually express obligations. This position paper proposes requirements for a general obligation language spanning access control and usage control. ...

Studies of workers in health care and the care of older people disclose tensions that emerge partly from their conflicting obligations. They incur some obligations from the personal relationships they have with clients, but these can be at odds with organizational demands and resource constraints. One implication is the need for policies to recognize the importance of allowing workers some disc...

The deontic logic dus is a deontic update semantics for prescriptive obligations based on the update semantics of Veltman. In dus the definition of logical validity of obligations is not based on static truth values but on dynamic action transitions. In this paper prescriptive prima facie obligations are formalized in update semantics. The logic formalizes the specificity principle, has reinsta...