AAMAS Conference 2026 Conference Paper
Leveraging Context-Oriented Programming to Implement Normative Rules in Autonomous Systems
- Roberto Casadei
- Martina De Sanctis
- Gianluca Filippone
- Sara Pettinari
- Gian Luca Scoccia
- Nicolas Troquard
Theincreasingsensitivitytohumanaspectsinautonomoussystems engineering calls for principled approaches to embed normative concerns into their behaviour. Recent research has focused on expressing and validating sets of social, legal, ethical, empathetic, and cultural (SLEEC) concerns as rules, and on verifying that a system design adheres to them. However, to date, there is limited work related to the actual implementation and actuation of SLEECaware behaviours. Yet, we believe that operationalising SLEEC rules can enable responsible behaviour of autonomous systems and advance research on the topic. For this purpose, we propose an operational solution for ethical-aware autonomous systems. Specifically, we devise a principled approach, which we call CO-SLEEC (Context-Oriented SLEEC), connecting the normative setting of SLEEC rules to context-oriented programming (COP). CO-SLEEC promotes runtime adaptation and exhibition of context-dependent ethical behaviour through a modular and transparent design.