Practical run-time norm enforcement with bounded lookahead

Norms have been widely proposed as a means of coordinating and controlling the behaviour of agents in a multi-agent system. A key challenge in normative MAS is norm enforcement: how and when to restrict the agents’ behaviour in order to obtain a desirable outcome? Even if a norm can be enforced the...

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Main Authors: Alechina, Natasha, Bulling, Nils, Dastani, Mehdi, Logan, Brian
Format: Conference or Workshop Item
Published: 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/30172/
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author Alechina, Natasha
Bulling, Nils
Dastani, Mehdi
Logan, Brian
author_facet Alechina, Natasha
Bulling, Nils
Dastani, Mehdi
Logan, Brian
author_sort Alechina, Natasha
building Nottingham Research Data Repository
collection Online Access
description Norms have been widely proposed as a means of coordinating and controlling the behaviour of agents in a multi-agent system. A key challenge in normative MAS is norm enforcement: how and when to restrict the agents’ behaviour in order to obtain a desirable outcome? Even if a norm can be enforced theoretically, it may not be enforceable in a grounded, practical setting. In this paper we study the problem of practical norm enforcement. The key notion is that of a guard. Guards are functions which restrict the possible actions after a history of events. We propose a formal, computational model of norms, guards and norm enforcement, based on linear-time temporal logic with past operators. We show that not all norms can be enforced by such guard functions, even in the presence of unlimited computational power to reason about future events. We analyse which norms can be enforced by guards if only a fixed lookahead is available. We investigate decision problems for this question with respect to specific classes of norms, related to safety and liveness properties.
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format Conference or Workshop Item
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institution University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
institution_category Local University
last_indexed 2025-11-14T19:08:12Z
publishDate 2015
recordtype eprints
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spelling nottingham-301722020-05-04T17:08:59Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/30172/ Practical run-time norm enforcement with bounded lookahead Alechina, Natasha Bulling, Nils Dastani, Mehdi Logan, Brian Norms have been widely proposed as a means of coordinating and controlling the behaviour of agents in a multi-agent system. A key challenge in normative MAS is norm enforcement: how and when to restrict the agents’ behaviour in order to obtain a desirable outcome? Even if a norm can be enforced theoretically, it may not be enforceable in a grounded, practical setting. In this paper we study the problem of practical norm enforcement. The key notion is that of a guard. Guards are functions which restrict the possible actions after a history of events. We propose a formal, computational model of norms, guards and norm enforcement, based on linear-time temporal logic with past operators. We show that not all norms can be enforced by such guard functions, even in the presence of unlimited computational power to reason about future events. We analyse which norms can be enforced by guards if only a fixed lookahead is available. We investigate decision problems for this question with respect to specific classes of norms, related to safety and liveness properties. 2015-05-04 Conference or Workshop Item PeerReviewed Alechina, Natasha, Bulling, Nils, Dastani, Mehdi and Logan, Brian (2015) Practical run-time norm enforcement with bounded lookahead. In: 14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 4-8 May 2015, Istanbul, Turkey. Norms; Run-time enforcement http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2772937
spellingShingle Norms; Run-time enforcement
Alechina, Natasha
Bulling, Nils
Dastani, Mehdi
Logan, Brian
Practical run-time norm enforcement with bounded lookahead
title Practical run-time norm enforcement with bounded lookahead
title_full Practical run-time norm enforcement with bounded lookahead
title_fullStr Practical run-time norm enforcement with bounded lookahead
title_full_unstemmed Practical run-time norm enforcement with bounded lookahead
title_short Practical run-time norm enforcement with bounded lookahead
title_sort practical run-time norm enforcement with bounded lookahead
topic Norms; Run-time enforcement
url https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/30172/
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/30172/