Authority, Deontics and Joint Intentions

Many agents are fielded within environments requiring modeling traditional organizational structures such as military hierarchies and corporations, with their associated authority relationships and a strong form of responsibility associated with subordinate agents. Addressing the needs above, we have developed an integrated semantic framework for modeling and operationalizing authority relationships and deontic operators based upon joint intention theory. This allows us to not only regularize the representation and reasoning components of agents with respect to the two aspects of agency but to also realize: improved coordination due to enhanced agent teamwork through the persistence and robustness they exhibit toward successful achievement of goals even in the face of problems; improved conformance of the behavior of each agent according to its organizational role and authority related to other organizational positions; and improved bounding of the behavior of agents when faced with the imposition of deontic operators from various sources