Norms for distributed organizations: Syntax, Semantics and Interpreter

Abstract

Agents are autonomous processes which together form multi-agent systems. Often we want to make sure that these agents behave according to certain guidelines. To make sure they do, we need control mechanisms. A possible control mechanism is an exogenous normative organization. Such an organization contains norms that represent the kind of behavior that we want from agents. Norms are regulations which can be violated. Therefore, when we program an organization we need to specify what happens when agents violate norms. Existing programming languages for exogenous normative organizations are used to make centralized control structures for multi-agent systems. However, some multi-agent system applications require a distributed control mechanism due to the structure and/or nature of the application. In this thesis we address this problem by proposing a programming language for distributed exogenous normative organizations. Norms are handled by a set of suborganizations which observe and influence a partition of the environment. We will cover the syntax, operational semantics and a prototype interpreter of the proposed programming language.