Mapping deontic operators to abductive expectations

Deontic concepts and operators have been widely used in several fields where representation of norms is needed, including legal reasoning and normative multi-agent systems. The EU-funded SOCS project has provided a language to specify the agent interaction in open multi-agent systems. The language is equipped with a declarative semantics based on abductive logic programming, and an operational semantics consisting of a (sound and complete) abductive proof procedure. In the SOCS framework, the specification is used directly as a program for the verification procedure. In this paper, we propose a mapping of the usual deontic operators (obligations, prohibition, permission) to language entities, called expectations, available in the SOCS social framework. Although expectations and deontic operators can be quite different from a philosophical viewpoint, we support our mapping by showing a similarity between the abductive semantics for expectations and the Kripke semantics that can be given to deontic operators. The main purpose of this work is to make the computational machinery from the SOCS social framework available for the specification and verification of systems by means of deontic operators. Marco Alberti received his laurea degree in Electronic Engineering in 2001 and his Ph.D. in Information Engineering in 2005 from the University of Ferrara, Italy. His research interests include constraint logic programming and abductive logic programming, applied in particular to the specification and verification of multi-agent systems. He has been involved as a research assistants in national and European research projects. He currently has a post-doc position in the Department of Engineering at the University of Ferrara. Marco Gavanelli is currently assistant professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Ferrara, Italy. He graduated in Computer Science Engineering in 1998 at the University of Bologna, Italy. He got his Ph.D. in 2002 at Ferrara University. His research interest include Artificial Intelligence, Constraint Logic Programming, Multi-criteria Optimisation, Abductive Logic Programming, Multi-Agent Systems. He is a member of ALP (the Association for Logic Programming) and AI*IA (the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence). He has organised workshops, and is author of more than 30 publications between journals and conference proceedings. Evelina Lamma received her degree in Electronic Engineering from University of Bologna, Italy, in 1985 and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1990. Currently she is Full Professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Ferrara where she teaches Artificial Intelligence and Foundations of Computer Science. Her research activity focuses around: – programming languages (logic languages, modular and object-oriented programming); – artificial intelligence; – knowledge representation; – intelligent agents and multi-agent systems; – machine learning. Her research has covered implementation, application and theoretical aspects. She took part to several national and international research projects. She was responsible of the research group at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria of the University of Ferrara in the UE ITS-2001-32530 Project (named SOCS), in the the context of the UE V Framework Programme - Global Computing Action. Paola Mello received her degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 1982, and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1989. Since 1994 she has been Full Professor. She is enrolled, at present, at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Bologna (Italy), where she teaches Artificial Intelligence. Her research activity focuses on programming languages, with particular reference to logic languages and their extensions, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, expert systems with particular emphasis on medical applications, and multi-agent systems. Her research has covered implementation, application and theoretical aspects and is presented in several national and international publications. She took part to several national and international research projects in the context of computational logic. Giovanni Sartor is Marie-Curie professor of Legal informatics and Legal Theory at the European University Institute of Florence and professor of Computer and Law at the University of Bologna (on leave), after obtaining a PhD at the European University Institute (Florence), working at the Court of Justice of the European Union (Luxembourg), being a researcher at the Italian National Council of Research (ITTIG, Florence), and holding the chair in Jurisprudence at Queen’s University of Belfast (where he now is honorary professor). He is co-editor of the Artificial Intelligence and Law Journal and has published widely in legal philosophy, computational logic, legislation technique, and computer law. Paolo Torroni is Assistant Professor in computing at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Bologna, Italy. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science and Electronic Engineering in 2002, with a dissertation on logic-based agent reasoning and interaction. His research interests mainly focus on computational logic and multi-agent systems research, including logic programming, abductive and hypothetical reasoning, agent interaction, dialogue, negotiation, and argumentation. He is in the steering committee of the CLIMA and DALT international workshops and of the Italian logic programming interest group GULP.