Verifying conflicts among multiple norms in multi-agent systems

Abstract

Norms represent the expected behavior of an agent in a multi-agent system. Generally, norms describe the actions that can be performed, must be performed, and cannot be performed in the system. Due to the number of norms defined to govern a multi-agent systems (MAS), norms may conflict with each other. Norms are in conflict when the fulfillment of one norm violates the other and vice-versa. There are several works that analyze the conflicting norms. However, to the best of our knowledge, these works only analyze conflicts between pairs of norms. There are situations that conflict can only be detected when we analyze several norms together. This work presents an approach to check for conflicts among multiple norms and a strategy to minimize the complexity of this NP-hard problem.