Severity-sensitive robustness analysis in normative systems

Gasparini, Luca, Norman, Timothy J., Kollingbaum, Martin J. and Chen, Liang (2015) Severity-sensitive robustness analysis in normative systems. Telang, Pankaj, Ghose, Aditya, Thangarajah, John and Oren, Nir (eds.) In Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems X - COIN 2014 International Workshops COIN@AAMAS, Revised Selected Papers. vol. 9372, Springer. pp. 72-88 . (doi:10.1007/978-3-319-25420-3_5).

Abstract

Norms specify ideal behaviour. Agents, however, are autonomous, and may fail to comply with the ideal. Contrary to Duty obligations can be used to specify reparational behaviour that mitigates the effects of a violation. In addition to specifying reparational behaviours, it is important to understand how robust a system is against possible violations. Depending on what kind of system property we want to preserve, non-compliance with different norms may be of varying severity. We propose a method for analysing robustness of normative systems, with support for Contrary to Duty obligations. We introduce violation severity as a concept orthogonal to reparational behaviour and specify it by means of a partial order over norms. We use this severity partial order, together with normative specifications, to rank the possible worlds from the most to the least compliant. In this way, we are able to use model checking to analyse robustness to a certain severity, or whether it is possible to achieve a certain goal, without violating any norm of a given severity.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Author: Timothy J. Norman

Download statistics