MaNEA: A distributed architecture for enforcing norms in open MAS

Norms have been promoted as a coordination mechanism for controlling agent behaviours in open MAS. Thus, agent platforms must provide normative support, allowing both norm-aware and non-norm-aware agents to take part in MAS that are controlled by norms. In this paper, the most relevant proposals on the definition of norm enforcement mechanisms are analyzed. These proposals present several drawbacks that make them unsuitable for open MAS. In response to these problems, this paper describes a new Norm-Enforcing Architecture aimed at controlling norms in open MAS. Specifically, this architecture supports the creation and deletion of norms on-line as well as the dynamic activation and expiration of instances. Finally, it can dynamically adapt to different scale MAS. The efficiency of this architecture has been experimentally evaluated and the results are shown in this paper. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.We acknowledge ITMAS 2011 as the forum in which the main ideas behind this paper were preliminary discussed. This paper was partially funded by the Spanish government under projects CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00022, TIN2009-13839- C03-01, TIN2012-36586-C03-01 and by the FPU grant AP-2007-01256 awarded to N.Criado. This research has also been partially funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya under the grant 2009-SGR-1434Peer Reviewe