Severity-sensitive norm-governed multi-agent planning

Abstract

In making practical decisions, agents are expected to comply with ideals of behaviour, or norms. In reality, it may not be possible for an individual, or a team of agents, to be fully compliant-actual behaviour often differs from the ideal. The question we address in this paper is how we can design agents that act in such a way that they select collective strategies to avoid more critical failures (norm violations), and mitigate the effects of violations that do occur. We model the normative requirements of a system through contrary-to-duty obligations and violation severity levels, and propose a novel multi-agent planning mechanism based on Decentralised POMDPs that uses a qualitative reward function to capture levels of compliance: N-Dec-POMDPs. We develop mechanisms for solving this type of multi-agent planning problem and show, through empirical analysis, that joint policies generated are equally as good as those produced through existing methods but with significant reductions in execution time.

Norm emergence in multiagent systems: a viewpoint paper

“…Violations or sub-ideal behaviour of agents is inevitable [45]. Though it is usually beneficial for agents to comply with norms as described above, there are some situations where it might be better for the agent to violate norms.…”

“…Agents may choose to violate norms when violations provide a better way to achieve goals [95]; when personal goals conflict with organisational goals e.g. in common pool resources [46,48]; or when they need to violate one set of norms to comply with another set of norms [1,45].…”

“…Ajmeri et al [1] and Gasparini et al [45] demonstrate strategies for making decisions in situations where violating one set of norms in order to adhere to another set of norms is also the rational decision. Ajmeri et al [1] refer to conflicting commitments and the use of some importance ordering to make a rational decision when these occur.…”

“…Gasparini et al [45] consider that norms and the violations of norms vary in severity. The concept of determining the severity of norm violations is important since there may be some norms that it is reasonable to violate and others whose violation can have catastrophic effects.…”

Resource-bounded Norm Monitoring In Multi-agent Systems

“…However, it is also common that norms have different importance. This importance is related to the consequences of norm violations/fulfilments (e.g., the violation of some norms can be more severe than others) and is usually modelled by: predefined sanctions and rewards (Alechina et al, 2012), a preference relation over norms (Dignum, Morley, Sonenberg, & Cavedon, 2000), or a relative severity function (Gasparini, Norman, & Kollingbaum, 2017). The process by which our monitor checks compliance with norms does not depend on norm importance.…”