Norm Monitoring under Partial Action Observability

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of monitoring norm compliance in multi-agent systems when only partial action observations are available, proposing reconstruction methods to improve detection of violations and fulfillments.

Contribution

It formalizes the problem of reconstructing unobserved actions and introduces algorithms and an information model for norm monitoring under partial observability.

Findings

Reconstructing unobserved actions significantly improves detection of norm violations.

The proposed methods increase the number of detected norm violations and fulfillments.

Evaluation demonstrates effectiveness of reconstruction algorithms in partial observability scenarios.

Abstract

In the context of using norms for controlling multi-agent systems, a vitally important question that has not yet been addressed in the literature is the development of mechanisms for monitoring norm compliance under partial action observability. This paper proposes the reconstruction of unobserved actions to tackle this problem. In particular, we formalise the problem of reconstructing unobserved actions, and propose an information model and algorithms for monitoring norms under partial action observability using two different processes for reconstructing unobserved actions. Our evaluation shows that reconstructing unobserved actions increases significantly the number of norm violations and fulfilments detected.