Agents Dealing with Norms and Regulations

ABSTRACT

Norms influence behaviour in many ways. In situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic where the effect of policies on the spread of the virus is evaluated, this leads to disputes about their effectiveness. In order to build agent-based social simulations that give proper support for this evaluation process we need agents that properly deal with norms. In this paper we present a new agent deliberation architecture that takes more aspects of norms into account than traditional architectures have done. Dealing properly with norms means that agents can reason through the consequences of the norms, that they are used to motivate and not just constrain behaviour, and that the agents can violate the norm as well. For the former we use the ideas of perspectives on norms, while the latter is enabled through the use of values. Within our architecture we can also represent habitual behaviour, context sensitive planning, and through the use of landmarks, reactive planning. We use the example of a restaurant-size based restriction to show how our architecture works.