Engineering Norm-aware BDI Agents

Norms are an important abstraction for multi-agent systems (MAS) because they specify flexible constraints. As constraints they help bring order to agent behaviour. However, being flexible, they can be violated, and thus do not over-constrain autonomous entities. In order to build MAS with cognitive agents that use norms we need to be able to engineer these agents to be norm-aware, i. e. being able to take norms into account in their reasoning. This paper defines an approach to engineering norm-aware BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) agents that can deal with cases including adding steps in order to comply with norms and that can be used with off-the-shelf BDI agent languages.

Authors

• Michael Winikoff Victoria University of Wellington
• Frank Dignum Umeå University
• Sebastian Rodriguez RMIT University
• John Thangarajah RMIT University

Keywords

• Norms
• Norm-awareagents
• GoalPlanTree
• Belief-Desire-Intention