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comply with obligations and suppressing the execution of existing plans that violate
prohibitions. However, they have not considered the desires and plans priorities. In our
work we consider that obligations and prohibitions may increase or decrease the priority
of a desire or a plan, and that the selection of desires and plans are based on their prior-
ities. The agents built according to the architecture presented in [5] are able to evaluate
the effects of norms on their desires helping then on deciding to comply or not with the
norms. This architecture is based on the BDI architecture whose properties have been
expanded to include normative reasoning. In the
Norm Review
process being proposed,
we extend some of the verifications defined in [5], such as: our architecture checks
(i)
if the norm was not adopted already and
(ii)
if the agent is the addressee of the norm.
Besides, in the
Norm selection
process, although the approach proposed in [5] evalu-
ates the positive and negative effects of norms on the agent desires, it does not consider
the influence of rewards in such evaluation. The authors in [3] present concepts, and
their relations, that are used for modelling autonomous agents in an environment that is
governed by some (social) norms. Although such approach considers that the selection
of desires and plans should be based on their priorities and that such priorities can be
influenced by norms, it does not present a complete strategy with a set of verification in
the norm review process, and strategies to evaluate, identify and solve conflicts between
norms such as our work does.
7
Conclusions
This paper proposes an extension to the BDI architecture called NBDI to build goal-
oriented agents able to: (i) check if the agent should adopt or not a norm, (ii) evaluate
the pros and cons associated with the fulfilment or violation of the norm, (iii) check
and solve conflicts among norms, and (iv) choose desires and plans according to their
decisions of fulfilling or not a norm.
By implementing the algorithms from 1 to 9 and using the Normative Jason plat-
form, the applicability of NBDI architecture could be verified in the example presented
in Section 3. Such agents are responsible to plan the evacuation of people that are in
hazardous location, check the incoming perceptions (including norms), select the norms
they intend to fulfil based on the benefits they provide to the achievement of the agent's
desires and intentions, identify and solve conflicts among the selected norms, and decide
to cope or not with the norms while dropping, retaining or adopting new intentions. We
are investigating the need for extenting the AgentSpeak language with new predicates
that better represent the norms.
References
1. Beavers, G., Hexmoor, H.: Obligations in a bdi agent architecture. In: IC-AI (2002)
2. Castelfranchi, C., Dignum, F., Jonker, C., Treur, J.: Deliberative normative agents: Principles
and architecture. In: Proc. of the 6th Int. Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and
Languages (1999)
3. Dignum, F.: Autonomous agents and social norms. In: Proc. of the Workshop on Norms, Obli-
gations and Conventions, pp. 56-71 (1996)
