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of a society in an autonomous way. The NBDI (Norm-Belief-Desire-Intention) archi-
tecture extends the BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) architecture [8] by including norms
related functions to support normative reasoning. The agents built according to the pro-
posed architecture have:
(i)
a review function of norms and beliefs used to check the
incoming perceptions (including norms),
(ii)
a norm selection function to select the
norms they intend to fulfill based on the benefits they provide to the achievement of the
agent's desires and intentions, and to identify and solve conflicts among the selected
norms, and
(iii)
a norm filter where the agents decide to cope or not with the norms
while dropping, retaining or adopting new intentions.
We demonstrate the applicability of the NBDI architecture through a non-combatant
evacuation scenario where the tasks related to review, select and filter norms are im-
plemented by using the Normative Jason platform [7] that already provides support to
the implementation of BDI agents and a set of normative functions able to check if the
agent should adopt or not a norm, evaluate the pros and cons associated with the ful-
fillment or violation of the norm, check and solve conflicts among norms, and choose
desires and plans according to their decisions of fulfilling or not a norm.
The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 we outline the background about
norms that is necessary to follow the paper. In Section 3 we present the non-combatant
evacuation scenario where norms are defined to regulate the behaviour of rescue agents.
In 4 the proposed NBDI normative agent architecture is explained and exemplified by
using the proposed scenario. Section 5 demonstrates the applicability of the NBDI ar-
chitecture. Section 6 summarizes relevant related work and, finally, Section 7 concludes
and presents some future work.
2Norms
In this work, we adopt the representation for norms described in [7], as shown below:
norm
(
Addressee
,
Activation
,
Expiration
,
Rewards
,
Punishments
,
DeonticConcept
,
State
)
where
Addressee
is the agent or role responsible for fulfilling the norm,
Activation
is the activation condition for the norm to become active,
Expiration
is the expiration
condition for the norm to become inactive,
Rewards
are the rewards to be given to the
agent for fulfilling a norm,
Punishments
are the punishments to be given to the agent
for violating a norm,
DeonticConcept
indicates if the norm states an obligation or a
prohibition, and
State
describes a set of states being regulated.
3
Scenario: Rescue Operation
The applicability of the architecture proposed in this paper is demonstrated by using the
simplified non-combatant evacuation scenario. In such scenario agents have the goals to
plan the evacuation of members of a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) that are in
hazardous location and, to do so, they can use different resources that help to evacuate
the members, such as:
(i)
helicopters,
(ii)
troops and
(iii)
land-based helicopters. Con-
sidering that such resources are limited, we have a
Commander Agent
that is responsible
