Evolutionary Synthesis of Stable Normative Systems

Normative systems are a widely used framework to coordinate interdependent activities in multi-agent systems. Most research in this area has focused on how to compute normative systems that effectively accomplish a coordination task, as well as additional criteria such as synthesising norms that do not over-regulate a system, and the emergence of norms that remain stable over time. We introduce a framework for the synthesis of stable normative systems that are sufficient and necessary for coordination. Our approach is based on ideas from evolutionary game theory. We simulate multiagent systems in which useful norms are more likely to prosper than useless norms. We empirically show the effectiveness of our approach in a simulated traffic domain.