Abstract
Deontic concepts and operators have been widely used in several fields where representation of norms is needed, including legal reasoning and normative multi-agent systems.
The EU-funded SOCS project has provided a language to specify the agent interaction in open multi-agent systems. The language is equipped with a declarative semantics based on abductive logic programming, and an operational semantics consisting of a (sound and complete) abductive proof procedure. In the SOCS framework, the specification is used directly as a program for the verification procedure.
In this paper, we propose a mapping of the usual deontic operators (obligations, prohibition, permission) to language entities, called expectations, available in the SOCS social framework. Although expectations and deontic operators can be quite different from a philosophical viewpoint, we support our mapping by showing a similarity between the abductive semantics for expectations and the Kripke semantics that can be given to deontic operators.
The main purpose of this work is to make the computational machinery from the SOCS social framework available for the specification and verification of systems by means of deontic operators.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Alberti M, Gavanelli M, Lamma E, Mello P, Torroni P (2003a) An abductive interpretation for open societies. In: Cappelli A, Turini F (eds) AI*IA 2003: Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Proceedings of the 8th Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, Pisa (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence), vol. 2829. Springer-Verlag, pp 287–299
Alberti M, Ciampolini A, Gavanelli M, Lamma E, Mello P, Torroni, P (2003b) A social ACL Semantics by Deontic Constraints. In: Maürík V, Müller J, Püechouücek M (eds) Multi-Agent Systems and Applications III. Proceedings of the 3rd International Central and Eastern European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, CEEMAS 2003. (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence), vol. 2691. Springer-Verlag, Prague, Czech Republic: pp 204–213
Alberti M, Gavanelli M, Lamma E, Mello P, Torroni, P (2003c) Specification and Verification of Agent Interactions using Social Integrity Constraints. Electr Notes Theor Comp Sci 85(2)
Alberti M, Daolio D, Gavanelli M, Lamma E, Mello P, Torroni P (2004a) Specification and Verification of Agent Interaction Protocols in a Logic-based System. In: Haddad H M, Omicini A, Wainwright R L (eds) Proceedings of the 19th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2004). Special Track on Agents, Interactions, Mobility, and Systems (AIMS). ACM Press, Nicosia, Cyprus pp 72– 78
Alberti M, Chesani F, Gavanelli M, Lamma E, Mello P, Torroni P (2005a) The SOCS Computational Logic Approach for the Specification and Verification of Agent Societies. In: Priami C, Quaglia P (eds) Global Computing: IST/FET International Workshop, GC 2004 Rovereto, Italy, March 9–12, 2004 Revised Selected Papers. (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence), vol. 3267. Springer-Verlag, pp 324– 339
Alberti M, Gavanelli M, Lamma E, Mello P, Torroni P (2005b) The SCIFF abductive proof procedure. In Bandini S, Manzoni S (eds) Proceedings of the 9th National Congress on Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 2005. (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence) vol. 3673. Springer-Verlag, Milan, Italy, pp 135–147
Alberti M, Chesani F, Gavanelli M, Lamma E, Mello P, Torroni P (2006) Compliance verification of agent interaction: a logic-based tool. Applied Artificial Intelligence 20(2–4):133–157
ALFEBIITE (1999) ALFEBIITE: A Logical Framework for Ethical Behaviour between Infohabitants in the Information Trading Economy of the Universal Information Ecosystem. IST–1999–10298. http://www.iis.ee.ic.ac.uk/alfebiite/ab-home.htm Home Page:
Anderson A (1958) A Reduction of Deontic Logic to Alethic Modal Logic. Mind 67:100–103
Apt KR, Bol RN (1994) Logic Programming and Negation: A survey. J Logic Progr 19/20:9–71
Arisha KA, Ozcan F, Ross R, Subrahmanian VS, Eiter T, Kraus S (1999) IMPACT: A Platform for Collaborating Agents. IEEE Intell Syst 14(2):64–72
Artikis A, Pitt J, Sergot M (2002) Animated specifications of computational societies. In: Castelfranchi C, Lewis Johnson W (eds) Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2002), Part III. ACM Press Bologna, Italy pp 1053–1061
Boella G, van der Torre, L WN (2003) Attributing mental attitudes to normative systems. In: Rosenschein JS, Sandholm T, Wooldridge M, Yokoo M (eds) Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2003). ACM Press Melbourne, Victoria pp 942–943
Boella G, van der Torre L, Verhagen H (eds) (2005) Proceedings of the Symposium on Normative Multi Agent-Systems. University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK
Bracciali A, Demetriou N, Endriss U, Kakas A, Lu W, Mancarella P, Sadri F, Stathis K, Toni F, Terreni G (2005) The KGP Model of Agency: Computational Model and Prototype Implementation. In: Priami C, Quaglia P (eds) Global computing: IST/FET International Workshop, GC 2004 Rovereto, Italy, March 9-12, 2004 Revised Selected Papers (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence), vol. 3267. Springer-Verlag, pp 340–367
Broersen J, Dignum F, Dignum V, Meyer J-J Ch (2004) Designing a Deontic Logic of Deadlines. In: Lomuscio A, Nute D (eds) DEON (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), vol. 3065. Springer, pp 43–56
Castelfranchi C, Dignum F, Jonker CM, Treur J (1999) Deliberative Normative Agents: Principles and architecture. In: Jennings NR, Lespérance Y (eds) Intelligent agents VI, Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, 6th International Workshop, ATAL ’99, Orlando, Florida, USA, Proceedings. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), no. 1757. Springer-Verlag, pp 364–378
Clark KL (1978) Negation as failure. In: Gallaire H, Minker J (eds) Logic and Data Bases. Plenum Press, pp 293–322
Conte R, Falcone R, Sartor G (1999) Special Issue on Agents and Norms. Art Intell Law 1(7)
Dignum V, Meyer JJ, Dignum F, Weigand H (2002a) Formal Specification of Interaction in Agent Societies. In: Proceedings of the Second Goddard Workshop on Formal Approaches to Agent-Based Systems (FAABS), Maryland
Dignum V, Meyer JJ, Weigand H, Dignum F (2002b) An Organizational-Oriented Model for Agent Societies. In: Proceedings of International Workshop on Regulated Agent-Based Social Systems: Theories and Applications. AAMAS’02, Bologna
Dignum V, Meyer JJ, Weigand H (2002c) Towards an Organizational Model for Agent Societies Using Contracts. In: Castelfranchi C, Lewis Johnson W (eds) Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2002), Part II. Bologna, Italy: ACM Press, pp 694–695
Eiter T, Subrahmanian VS, Pick G (1999) Heterogeneous active agents, I: Semantics. Art Intell 108(1–2):179–255
Esteva M, de la Cruz D, Sierra C (2002) ISLANDER: An electronic institutions editor. In: Castelfranchi C, Lewis Johnson W (eds) Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2002), Part III. ACM Press, Bologna, Italy pp 1045– 1052
Fung TH, Kowalski RA (1997) The IFF proof procedure for abductive logic programming. J Logic Progr 33(2): 151–165
Hewitt C (1991) Open Information Systems Semantics for Distributed Art Intell. Art Intell 47(1–3):79– 106
Kakas AC, Kowalski RA, Toni F (1993) Abductive Logic Programming. J Logic Comput 2(6):719– 770
Kunen K (1987) Negation in logic progr J Logic Progr vol. 4, pp 289–308
López y López, Fabiola, Luck, Michael, d’Inverno, Mark (2005) A Normative Framework for Agent-Based Systems. In: NORMAS05
Meyer JJ Ch (1988) A Different Approach to Deontic Logic: Deontic Logic Viewed as a Variant of Dynamic Logic. Notre Dame J. Form Logic 29(1):109–136
Noriega P, Sierra C (2002) Institutions in perspective: An extended abstract. In: 6th International Workshop CIA-2002 on Cooperative Information Agents (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence), vol. 2446. Springer-Verlag
Prakken H, Sergot M (1996) Contrary-to-duty obligations. Studia Logica 57(1):91–115
Ryu Young U, Lee Ronald M (1993) Defeasible Deontic Reasoning: A Logic Programming Model. In: Meyer J-J Ch, Wieringa RJ (eds) Deontic Logic in Computer Science: Normative System Specification. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, pp 225–241
Sadri F, Stathis K, Toni F (2005) Normative KGP agents: A Preliminary Report. In: Boella et al. (2005)
Sartor G (2004) Legal reasoning. Treatise, vol. 5. Kluwer Dordrecht
SOCS (2002) Societies of computeeS (SOCS): A computational logic model for the description, analysis and verification of global and open societies of heterogeneous computees. IST–2001–32530. Home Page: http://lia.deis.unibo.it/Research/SOCS/
van der Torre L (2003) Contextual Deontic Logic: Normative Agents, Violations and Independence. Ann Math Art Intell 37(1):33–63
van der Torre LWN, Tan Y-H (1999) Diagnosis and Decision Making in Normative Reasoning. Artif. Intell. Law 7(1):51–67
Wright GH (1951) Deontic logic. Mind 60:1–15
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Marco Alberti received his laurea degree in Electronic Engineering in 2001 and his Ph.D. in Information Engineering in 2005 from the University of Ferrara, Italy. His research interests include constraint logic programming and abductive logic programming, applied in particular to the specification and verification of multi-agent systems. He has been involved as a research assistants in national and European research projects. He currently has a post-doc position in the Department of Engineering at the University of Ferrara.
Marco Gavanelli is currently assistant professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Ferrara, Italy. He graduated in Computer Science Engineering in 1998 at the University of Bologna, Italy. He got his Ph.D. in 2002 at Ferrara University. His research interest include Artificial Intelligence, Constraint Logic Programming, Multi-criteria Optimisation, Abductive Logic Programming, Multi-Agent Systems. He is a member of ALP (the Association for Logic Programming) and AI*IA (the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence). He has organised workshops, and is author of more than 30 publications between journals and conference proceedings.
Evelina Lamma received her degree in Electronic Engineering from University of Bologna, Italy, in 1985 and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1990. Currently she is Full Professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Ferrara where she teaches Artificial Intelligence and Foundations of Computer Science. Her research activity focuses around:
– programming languages (logic languages, modular and object-oriented programming);
– artificial intelligence;
– knowledge representation;
– intelligent agents and multi-agent systems;
– machine learning.
Her research has covered implementation, application and theoretical aspects. She took part to several national and international research projects. She was responsible of the research group at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria of the University of Ferrara in the UE ITS-2001-32530 Project (named SOCS), in the the context of the UE V Framework Programme - Global Computing Action.
Paola Mello received her degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 1982, and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1989. Since 1994 she has been Full Professor. She is enrolled, at present, at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Bologna (Italy), where she teaches Artificial Intelligence. Her research activity focuses on programming languages, with particular reference to logic languages and their extensions, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, expert systems with particular emphasis on medical applications, and multi-agent systems. Her research has covered implementation, application and theoretical aspects and is presented in several national and international publications. She took part to several national and international research projects in the context of computational logic.
Giovanni Sartor is Marie-Curie professor of Legal informatics and Legal Theory at the European University Institute of Florence and professor of Computer and Law at the University of Bologna (on leave), after obtaining a PhD at the European University Institute (Florence), working at the Court of Justice of the European Union (Luxembourg), being a researcher at the Italian National Council of Research (ITTIG, Florence), and holding the chair in Jurisprudence at Queen’s University of Belfast (where he now is honorary professor). He is co-editor of the Artificial Intelligence and Law Journal and has published widely in legal philosophy, computational logic, legislation technique, and computer law.
Paolo Torroni is Assistant Professor in computing at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Bologna, Italy. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science and Electronic Engineering in 2002, with a dissertation on logic-based agent reasoning and interaction. His research interests mainly focus on computational logic and multi-agent systems research, including logic programming, abductive and hypothetical reasoning, agent interaction, dialogue, negotiation, and argumentation. He is in the steering committee of the CLIMA and DALT international workshops and of the Italian logic programming interest group GULP.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Alberti, M., Gavanelli, M., Lamma, E. et al. Mapping deontic operators to abductive expectations. Comput Math Organiz Theor 12, 205–225 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-006-9544-8
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-006-9544-8