A distributed normative infrastructure for situated multi-agent organisations

Abstract

In most of the existing approaches to the design of multi-agent systems, there is no clear way in which to relate organisational and normative structures to the model of the environment where they are to be situated and operate. Our work addresses this problem by putting together, in a practical approach to developing multi-agent systems (and social simulations in particular), a high-level environment modelling language that incorporates aspects of agents, organisations, and normative structures. The paper explains in some detail how the ideas of normative objects and normative places, put together as a distributed normative infrastructure, allow the definition of certain kinds of situated multi-agent organisations, in particular organisations for multi-agent systems that operate within concrete environments. Normative objects are environment objects used to convey explicitly normative content that regulates the behaviour of agents within the place where such objects can be perceived by such agents. The paper defines these concepts, shows how they were integrated into the MAS-SOC multi-agent systems platform for social simulation, gives examples that illustrate the approach, and hints on new problems of (situated) organisational and normative structures that were brought forward by the work presented here. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.