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<article-title>Distributed Norm Management in Regulated Multi-Agent Systems</article-title>
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<author><a href="mailto:dg00@doc.ic.ac.uk"><name>Dorian Gaertner</name></a></author>
<aff>Dept. of Computing, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:andres@iiia.csic.es"><name>Andres Garcia-Camino</name></a></author>
<aff>IIIA-CSIC, 08193 Bellaterra, Spain</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:pablo@iiia.csic.es"><name>Pablo Noriega</name></a></author>
<aff>IIIA-CSIC, 08193 Bellaterra, Spain</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:jar@iiia.csic.es"><name>J.-A. Rodriguez-Aguilar</name></a></author>
<aff>IIIA-CSIC, 08193 Bellaterra, Spain</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:wvasconcelos@acm.org"><name>Wamberto Vasconcelos</name></a></author>
<aff>Dept. of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3UE, United Kingdom</aff>

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<abstract>
<title>ABSTRACT</title>
<p>Norms are widely recognised as a means of coordinating
multi-agent systems. The distributed management of norms
is a challenging issue and we observe a lack of <italic>truly distributed</italic>
computational realisations of normative models. In
order to regulate the behaviour of autonomous agents that
take part in multiple, related activities, we propose a normative
model, the <italic>Normative Structure</italic> (NS), an artifact that
is based on the propagation of normative positions (obligations,
prohibitions, permissions), as consequences of agents'
actions. Within a NS, conflicts may arise due to the dynamic
nature of the MAS and the concurrency of agents' actions.
However, ensuring conflict-freedom of a NS at design time
is computationally intractable. We show this by formalising
the notion of conflict, providing a mapping of NSs into
Coloured Petri Nets and borrowing well-known theoretical
results from that field. Since online conflict resolution is
required, we present a tractable algorithm to be employed
distributedly. We then demonstrate that this algorithm is
paramount for the distributed enactment of a NS.</p>
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