NorMAS 2008

Norms are essential for artificial agents meant to behave comparably to intelligent humans or to collaborate with them, and they are central to coordination, cooperation and decision-making alike. Normative multiagent systems combine theories and frameworks for normative systems with multiagent systems, which makes them a prime example of sociological theory put to work in agent research and of the relation between agent theory and sociology, philosophy, economics and legal science. The third edition extended the traditional view of norms by bringing in commitments, as used in MAS to model protocols. It followed NorMAS 2005, held as an AISB symposium at the University of Hertfordshire, and NorMAS 2007, held as Dagstuhl Seminar 07122; like them it sent a selection of papers to a journal special issue.

• Multiagent or society level
  • Balancing dynamics and statics at the agent (micro) and agent society (macro) level
  • Coordination based on normative multiagent systems
  • Emergence of conventions, norms, roles, and normative multiagent systems
  • Combining conventions with regulative, permissive, constitutive and other types of norms
  • Relation between NorMAS and contracts, security, and (electronic) institutions
  • Commitments vs obligations
  • Commitments, protocols and Agent Communication Languages
• Agent level
  • Alternatives to and extensions of the homo economicus and BDI logics
  • Extending logical frameworks to encompass norms in agent decision making
  • How to implement theories of norms in artificial agents
  • Policies and commitments
• Applications of NorMAS
  • Multiagent social simulation models containing norms
  • Mixing artificial and human agents in hybrid social systems