Indirect normative conflict: Conflict that depends on the application domain

Abstract

Norms are being used as a mechanism to regulate the behavior of autonomous, heterogeneous and independently designed agents. Norms describe what can be performed, what must be performed, and what cannot be performed in the multi-agent systems. Due to the number of norms specified to govern a multi-agent system, one important issue that has been considered by several approaches is the checking for normative conflicts. Two norms are said to be in conflict when the fulfillment of one norm violates the other and vice-versa. In this paper, we formally define the concept of an indirect normative conflict as a conflict between two norms that not necessarily have contradictory or contrary deontic modalities and that may govern (different but) related behaviors of (different but) related entities on (different but) related contexts. Finally, we present an ontology-based indirect norm conflict checker that automatically identifies direct and indirect norm conflicts on an ontology describing a set of norms and a set of relationships between the elements identified in the norms (behavior, entity and context).