Norm-ML A Modeling Language to Model Norms Karen Figueiredo and Viviane Torres da Silva* Computer Science Department, Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) Rua Passos da Pátria 156, Bloco E, 24210-240, Niterói, Brazil Keywords: Norm, Modeling, Validation, Metamodel. Abstract: Norms in multi-agent systems are mechanisms used to restrict the behavior of system entities during a period of time by defining what the entities are obligated, permitted or prohibited to do and by stating stimulus to their fulfillment by defining rewards and discouraging their violation by pointing out punishments. In this paper we propose a modeling language called NormML that makes possible the modeling of the norms together with its main properties and characteristics. 1 INTRODUCTION Norms are used to regulate the behavior of the agents in open multi-agent systems (MAS) by describing their obligations, permissions and prohibitions. Norms can be defined at design time together with the modeling of the system, or created at runtime by agents that have the power to do so (López y López, 2003). In this paper we focus on the description of norms at design time. The modeling of norms is an important part of the specification of a system and should be treated as an essential task of MAS design. Norms refer to actions and entities that compose a system. So, the refinement of the system may influence the norms and the definition of a new norm will only be possible if the actions, agents and roles being mentioned in the norm are being considered in the system design. Although there are many modeling languages and notations, proposed by methodologies and organizational models, that provide support to the modeling of norms, there is still a need for an approach that completely contemplates the main properties and characteristics of a norm, i.e., the key elements that compose a norm: deontic concept, involved entities, actions, activation constraints, sanctions and context. In this paper we identify these elements by follo- *The present work has been partially funded by the Brazilian research councils CNPq under grant 135891/2009-4 and 303531/2009-6 and FAPERJ under grant E- 26/110.959/2009, and by the Spanish project “Agreement Technologies" (CONSOLIDER CSD2007-0022, INGENIO 2010). wing the premise that norms restrict the behavior of system entities during a period of time and define the sanctions applied when they are violated or fulfilled. Such elements were found out after investigate ten specification and implementation languages used to describe and implement norms such as (García- Camino et al., 2006; López y López, 2003; Silva, 2008; Vasconcelos et al., 2007). It is the aim of the paper to present a normative modeling language called NormML, which is an extension of its preliminary version presented in (Silva et al., 2010), to model the main elements that compose the norms and to check the conflicts between them. Due to the lack of space, in this paper we focus only on the modelling of the norms. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the support given by the modeling languages and the notations provided by the methodologies and organizational models analyzed to model the norm elements that we have identified. Section 3 presents the normative modeling language NormML. Finally, Section 4 concludes and presents some future work. 2 RELATED WORK In this section, we analyze how MAS (i) modeling languages: AML (Danc, 2008) and AORML (Wagner, 2003); (ii) notations of methodologies: Gaia (Zambonelli et al., 2003), O-MaSE (Garcia- Ojeda et al., 2008), PASSI (Cossentino, 2005), 232 Figueiredo K. and Torres da Silva V.. Norm-ML - A Modeling Language to Model Norms. DOI: 10.5220/0003179502320237 In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART-2011), pages 232-237 ISBN: 978-989-8425-41-6 Copyright c  2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)