Run-Time Norm Compliance in BDI Agents

Normative systems offer a means to govern agent behaviour in dynamic open environments. Under the governance, individual agents themselves must reason about compliance with state-or event-based norms (or both) depending upon the formalism used. This paper describes how norm awareness enables a BDI agent to exhibit norm compliant behaviour at run-time taking into account normative factors. To this end, we propose N-Jason, a run-time norm compliant BDI agent framework which supports norm-aware deliberation as well as a run-time norm execution mechanism, through which previously unknown norms are recognized and bring about the triggering of plans. To be able to process a norm such as an obligation, the agent architecture must be able to deal with deadlines and priorities, and choose between plans triggered by a particular norm. Consequently, we extend the syntax and the scheduling algorithm of AgentSpeak(RT) to operate in the context of Jason/AgentSpeak(L) and provide 'real-time agency'.