An architecture for autonomous normative agents

It has been argued that innovative software applications such as those required by ambient intelligence, semantic grid, e-commerce and e-marketing can be modelled as societies of autonomous, heterogeneous, independently designed and self-interested agents. These agents might work on behalf of different users whose goals must satisfy. In societies like these, it is not surprising to find that the interests of some agents can be in conflict with the interests of other agents and, to avoid these situations, the introduction of norms that might influence their behaviour has been considered as indispensable. We state that agents able to join these societies must be provided with the means to deal with norms. However, since an agent´s priority is the satisfaction of its own goals, before complying with norms, the agent must evaluate the positive or negative effects of these norms on its goals. Providing an architecture to build these kinds of agents is the aim of This work. The proposed architecture is based on a very successful model of agents whose properties have been expanded to include normative reasoning.