Modelling normative frameworks using answer set programing

Abstract

Norms and regulations play an important role in the governance of human society. Social rules such as laws, conventions and contracts prescribe and regulate our behaviour, however it is possible for us to break these rules at our discretion and face the consequences. By providing the means to describe and reason about norms in a computational context, normative frameworks may be applied to software systems allowing for automated reasoning about the consequences of socially acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. In this paper, we outline our mathematical formulation for normative frameworks and describe how its semantics can be represented in ASP, thus enabling the construction of models of normative systems that can be subjected to formal verification and that can act as functional repositories of normative knowledge for the software components that participate in them. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.