A Metamodel Approach to Developing Adaptive Normative Agents

Multi-agent systems have been introduced as a new paradigm for conceptualizing, designing and implementing software systems that are becoming increasingly complex, open, distributed, dynamic, autonomous and highly interactive. However, agent-oriented software engineering has not been widely adopted, mainly due to lack of modeling languages that are expressive and comprehensive enough to represent relevant agent-related abstractions and support the refinement of design models into code. Most modeling languages do not define how these abstractions interact at runtime, but many software applications need to adapt their behavior, react to changes in their environments dynamically, and align with some form of individual or collective normative application behavior (e.g., obligations, prohibitions). In this paper, we propose a metamodel approach to developing adaptive normative agents. We believe the proposed approach will advance the state of the art in agent systems so that software technologies for dynamic, adaptive, norm-based applications can be developed and implemented.