Norm-based mechanism design.

The increasing presence of autonomous (software) systems in open environments in general, and the complex interactions taking place among them in particular, require flexible control and coordination mechanisms to guarantee desirable overall system level properties without limiting the autonomy of the involved systems. In artificial intelligence, and in particular in the multi-agent systems research field, social laws, norms, and sanctions have been widely proposed as flexible means for coordinating the behaviour of autonomous agents in multi-agent settings. Recently, many languages have been proposed to specify and implement norm-based environments where the behaviour of autonomous agents is monitored, evaluated based on norms, and possibly sanctioned if norms are violated.