Norms and Agents
Trackchairs
- Olivier Boissier olivier.boissier@emse.fr
- Catherine Tessier catherine.tessier@cert.fr
Abstract
Multi-Agent models and technologies contribute to the development of communication and cooperation infrastructure for decentralized and open applications (e.g. e-commerce, interactive games, social and collective robotics, ambient intelligence...) They also contribute to the simulation of collective phenomena in order to explain and understand their complex behaviours.
Although autonomy is a central property of this paradigm, control and regulation are important topics. Autonomous agents, i.e.digital entities taking part in the achievement of complex tasks in interaction with other agents or humans, must be controlled and regulated in order to exhibit coherent behaviours at the global system level. Research in the domain have thus proposed different models aiming at this regulation: organizations, policies, norms, institutions... The current evolution of the applications stresses the requirements of such regulation mechanisms while preserving autonomy, openness and decentralization.
We aim at reviewing the state of the art of the research in the multi-agent domain, and more generally in Artificial Intelligence, as far as the following topics are concerned:
- norms, institutions, organizations;
- validation, consistency of norms, institutions and organizations;
- control of autonomous agents within organizations, institutions and normative systems;
- dynamic aspects in terms of emergence and evolution of norms or organizations;
- social or legal concepts linked to norms and organizations: authority, power, dependency, penalties, contracts;
- authority sharing between agents and human operators or users: authority holding rules, decision power rules, operator/agent interaction control, operator's or agent's handing over or veto;
- norms for the agents and norms for the human operators or users;
- trust and reputation for the control of autonomous agents within organizations or institutions;
- normative agent architectures.