Disobedience in Normative Multi-agent Systems

An intelligent agent should be able to disobey the norms of its environment. We define disobedience as an act of intentional norm violation and we postulate the distinctions among four types of disobedience: direct violation, justified exception, civil disobedience, and trolling. Each type requires a distinct monitoring workflow: direct violations are sanctioned, exceptions are waived, civil disobedience is sanctioned but also logged as a reform signal, and trolls are sanctioned but excluded from reform processes. To capture this, we formalize a compliance management architecture that separates monitoring of observable behaviour, assessment of disobedience type, and dispatching to the appropriate enforcement workflow. This separation clarifies the dual perspective: agents use reasonbased practical reasoning to decide whether to obey or disobey, while the governance framework processes observable outcomes and routes them into differentiated institutional responses.

Authors

• Marija Slavkovik University of Bergen
• Liuwen Yu Luxembour Institute of Science and Technology
• Leon van der Torre University of Luxemburg
• Réka Markovich University of Luxemburg
• Beishui Liao Zhejiang University

Keywords

• Normative MAS
• Norm Violation
• Disobedience