General Terms

Agents based on reactive planning architectures use pre-specified plans as behaviour specifications. Normative agents are motivated by norms in their behaviour: obligations motivate them to act, prohibitions motivate them to refrain from certain actions, and permissions (or privileges) and capabilities specify the range of possible actions for such an agent. An important issue for normative agents is: under what circumstances is it appropriate for an agent to adopt a new set of obligations, prohibitions or permissions and what effect does it have on the agent’s normative state? In answering this question, a critical issue is whether or not this set of norms is consistent with the agent’s current normative state. Consistency of a set of norms is discussed in detail in respect to a reactive planning agent architecture – NoA, but, it is argued, provides useful insight to the problem of norm consistency in general and particularly where practical reasoning agents are concerned