We present a novel mechanism for the detection and resolution of conflicts within norm-regulated virtual environments, populated by agents whose behaviours are regulated by explicit obligations, permissions and prohibitions. A conflict between norms arises when an action is simultaneously prohibited and obliged or prohibited and permitted. In this paper, we use first-order unification and const...

In this paper we introduce a descriptive temporal deontic logic based on causal theories. The underlying nonmonotonic temporal logic has two distinctive properties. First, it distinguishes between observations and interventions, which among others is used to distinguish between the existence and creation of deontic states such as obligations, permissions and prohibitions. Second, its explicit c...

We study an important practical aspect of the route planning problem in real-world road networks – maneuvers. Informally, maneuvers represent various irregularities of the road network graph such as turn-prohibitions, traffic light delays, round-abouts, forbidden passages and so on. We propose a generalized model which can handle arbitrarily complex (and even negative) maneuvers and extend trad...

California legislation outlawed the use and sale of battery cages for egg-laying hens in 2015. While a number of ex ante studies projected the effects of the housing prohibitions, the ultimate ex post effects are unknown. Using a price series reported by the USDA, we study the movement of daily egg prices in California and the United States before and after the law’s implementation. Depending o...

In 2004, the Italian Parliament enacted a law regulating medically assisted reproduction. Although the law recognizes as legal certain assisted reproduction techniques, several other procedures are implicitly or expressly banned: oocyte and sperm donation, using embryos for the scientific research purposes and reproductive cloning. In this article, I outline the new legal framework, pointing ou...

The primary legal obstacles to conducting cybersecurity are not outright prohibitions but rather the difficulty of determining which of a large set of complex statutes might regulate a given research project. Privacy, computer abuse, tort, and contract law are all potentially applicable. Moreover, even when the law permits a research activity, researchers may wonder whether it is ethically perm...

Norms constitute a powerful coordination mechanism among heterogeneous agents. We propose means to specify and explicitly manage the normative positions of agents (permissions, prohibitions and obligations), with which distinct deontic notions and their relationships can be captured. Our rule-based formalism includes constraints for more expressiveness and precision and allows the norm-oriented...

Exposure to asbestos is associated with the development of benign and malign pleuropulmonary pathology. In recent years a broad set of regulations has been set in place, from the establishment of conditions in work involving exposure to asbestos to successive prohibitions on its use. Periodical medical checkups have been designed to detect these pathologies in exposed workers and, considering t...

A number of approaches to agent society modeling can be found in the Multi-Agent Systems literature which exploit (variants of) Deontic Logic. In this paper, after briefly mentioning related approaches, we focus on the Computational Logic (CL) approach for society modeling developed within the UE IST-2001-32530 Project (named SOCS), where obligations and prohibitions are mapped into abducible p...

In this paper we propose an extension of Defeasible Logic to represent and compute three concepts of defeasible permission. In particular, we discuss different types of explicit permissive norms that work as exceptions to opposite obligations. Moreover, we show how strong permissions can be represented both with, and without introducing a new consequence relation for inferring conclusions from ...