Norms Evaluation through Reputation Mechanisms for BDI Agents

Open multiagent systems are systems populated with autonomous agents whose intentions are unknown. Due to this uncertainty, reputation mechanisms arise as a key technology when designing such systems. These mechanisms endow agents with the capability to reason about the behaviour of their potential partners regarding certain criteria, for instance, a particular norm. Although normative systems have been deeply studied, few attention has been paid on how agents use the norms to reason about the behaviour of their partners. In this paper, we face this problem by extending a BDI architecture that incorporates a reputation model (BDI+Repage) with a normative layer. Using the reputation mechanism together with this normative layer allow the agents to evaluate the behaviour of their partners according to both organisational and individual norms and use such information to reason about their future interactions.