Authors:
Viviane Torres da Silva
1
;
Christiano Braga
2
and
Jean de Oliveira Zahn
2
Affiliations:
1
IBM Research (on leave from Universidade Federal Fluminense), Brazil
;
2
Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Agents, Norms, Conflicts, Application Domain.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Distributed and Mobile Software Systems
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Multi-Agent Systems
;
Software Engineering
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Norms are being used as a mechanism to regulate the behavior of autonomous, heterogeneous and independently
designed agents. Norms describe what can be performed, what must be performed, and what cannot be
performed in the multi-agent systems. Due to the number of norms specified to govern a multi-agent system,
one important issue that has been considered by several approaches is the checking for normative conflicts.
Two norms are said to be in conflict when the fulfillment of one norm violates the other and vice-versa. In
this paper, we formally define the concept of an indirect normative conflict as a conflict between two norms
that not necessarily have contradictory or contrary deontic modalities and that may govern (different but) related
behaviors of (different but) related entities on (different but) related contexts. Finally, we present an
ontology-based indirect norm conflict checker that automatically identifies direct and indirect norm conflicts
on an ontology describing a
set of norms and a set of relationships between the elements identified in the
norms (behavior, entity and context).
(More)