@conference {IIIA-2007-1581, title = {Distributed Norm Management in Regulated Multi-agent Systems}, booktitle = {AAMAS {\textquoteright}07: Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems}, year = {2007}, month = {14/05/07}, pages = {624-631}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {Honolulu, Hawaii}, abstract = {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 truly distributed 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 Normative Structure (NS), an artifact that is based on the propagation of normative positions (obligations, prohibitions, permissions), as consequences of agents{\textquoteright} actions. Within a NS, conflicts may arise due to the dynamic nature of the MAS and the concurrency of agents{\textquoteright} 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. \%for conflict resolution. We then demonstrate that this algorithm is paramount for the distributed enactment of a NS.}, isbn = {978-81-904262-7-5}, author = {Dorian Gaertner and Andr{\'e}s Garc{\'\i}a-Camino and Pablo Noriega and Juan A. Rodr{\'\i}guez-Aguilar and Wamberto W. Vasconcelos} }