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Group Norms for Multi-Agent Organisations

Published: 06 June 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Normative multi-agent systems offer the ability to integrate social and individual factors to provide increased levels of fidelity with respect to modelling social phenomena, such as cooperation, coordination, group decision making, and organization, in both human and artificial agent systems. An important open research issue refers to group norms, that is, norms that govern groups of agents. Depending on the interpretation, group norms may be intended to affect the group as a whole, each member of a group, or some members of the group. Moreover, upholding group norms may require coordination among the members of the group. We have identified three sets of agents affected by group norms, namely, (i) the addressees of the norm, (ii) those that will act on it, and (iii) those that are responsible for ensuring norm compliance. We present a formalism to represent these, connecting it to a minimalist agent organisation model. We use our formalism to develop a reasoning mechanism that enables agents to identify their position with respect to a group norm to further support agent autonomy and coordination when deciding on possible courses of action.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems
ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems  Volume 11, Issue 2
Special Section on Best Papers from SASO 2014 and Regular Articles
July 2016
267 pages
ISSN:1556-4665
EISSN:1556-4703
DOI:10.1145/2952298
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 06 June 2016
Accepted: 01 January 2016
Revised: 01 October 2015
Received: 01 December 2014
Published in TAAS Volume 11, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Norms
  2. norm reasoning
  3. organisation

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  • Research
  • Refereed

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  • Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC-UK) within the research project “Scrutable Autonomous Systems”

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  • (2021) Nova: Value-based Negotiation of NormsACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/346505412:4(1-29)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2021
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