Formal Frameworks for Verifying Normative Multi-agent Systems

Abstract

In this paper we concern ourselves with normative multi-agent systems, which are multi-agent systems governed by a set of norms. In these systems, the internals and architecture of the participating agents may be unknown to us, which disables us to make any strong assumption on the possible behaviour that these agents may exhibit. Thus, we cannot simply assume that the agents are aware of the norms, or that they are compliant with respect to the norms. In other words, a crucial problem that needs to be solved is how we can verify these systems if we have no idea whether the agents will be norm-obedient. This paper investigates two distinct formal frameworks which allow us to tackle this problem, namely in the first part of this paper we propose a logic-based framework which uses compliance types, and in the second part we propose a framework which tackles the problem from a mechanism-design perspective.