Norms of Behaviour and Their Identification and Verification in Open Multi-Agent Societies

Abstract

Norms have an obvious role in the coordinating and predicting behaviours in societies of software agents. Most researchers assume that agents already know the norms of their societies beforehand at design time. Others assume that norms are assigned by a leader or a legislator. Some researchers take into account the acquisition of societies' norms through inference. Their works apply to closed multi-agent societies in which the agents have identical or similar internal architecture for representing norms. This paper addresses three things: 1 the idea of a Verification Component that was previously used to verify candidate norms in multi-agent societies, 2 a known modification of the Verification Component that makes it applicable in open multi-agent societies, and 3 a modification of the Verification Component, so that agents can dynamically infer the new emerged and abrogated norms in open multi-agent societies. Using the JADE software framework, we build a restaurant interaction scenario as an example where restaurants usually host heterogeneous agents, and demonstrate how permission and prohibition of behavior can be identified by agents using dynamic norms.