Norms in Multi-agent Systems
As a short introduction to the topic, we have to introduce the concepts of agent and Multi-agent system (MAS).
Multi-agent systems, as its name states, are systems composed by agents that may be software, robots or humans.
I’m not going to give a deep introduction on agents. Further information here.
In the 90s, Philosophy Professor John Searle contributed with the idea of Social Reality, i.e. there exist brute facts, as the height of a mountain, and institutional facts, as the score of a football game. Furthermore, he stated that institutional facts are constructed with logical rules of the form “X counts as Y in C”.
With these two notions, we defined brute and institutional events. Whereas brute events are unavoidable and performed by agents, institutional events are the subset of brute events that is considered valid in a given context, namely the institution.
For instance, waiving a hand counts as a greeting in most situations but it may count as a bid in the context of an English Auction.
With these notions, we are able to enforce norms as traslations of brute events to institutional ones that cause changes in the context (or institution) where the event was generated.
My thesis proposes a distributed architecture for MASs, based on Electronic Institutions, that enforce norms and three improvements on norm representation and enforcement (i.e., implementation in common computer science terminology).
It’s is not the only way to implement norms in MASs, as a lot of work has been and is currently being developed, but at least is a contribution to improve the advances in the topic.
For their application in Institutional Robotics, I continue improving norm representation and enforcement on MASs. But I will reveal my last advances, if the paper gets published.
