this paper was to address the role of deontic logic in legal knowledge representation. However, we now feel that this question cannot, and should not, be divorced from consideration of a much broader set of questions concerning the

In this paper we present some concepts and their relations that are necessary for modeling autonomous agents in an environment that is governed by some (social) norms. We divide the norms over three levels: the private level the contract level and the convention level. We show how deontic logic can be used to model the concepts and how the theory of speech acts can be used to model the generation of (some of) the norms. Finally we give some idea about an agent architecture incorporating the social norms based on a BDI framework.

Deontic logic is the logic that deals with actual as well as ideal behavior of systems. In this paper, we survey a number of applications of deontic logic in computer science that have arisen in the eighties, and give a systematic framework in which these applications can be classified. Many applications move in the direction of programming a computer in deontic logic to make the computer prohibit, permit or obligate people to do something. We discuss conditions under which this possibility is realistic and conditions under which it would be admissible to do so.

In this paper we present a Gentzen system for reasoning with contrary-to-duty obligations. The intuition behind the system is that a contrary-to-duty is a special kind of normative exception. The logical machinery to formalise this idea is taken from substructural logics and it is based on the definition of a new non-classical connective capturing the notion of reparational obligation. Then the system is tested against well-known contrary-to-duty paradoxes. 1

this article (cf. [KH94]).

The contribution of this paper 1 is threefold: First, we outline some possibilities for use of deontic logics (the logics of obligation and permission) in multiagent systems. Second, we point out some problems pertaining to the formalisation of obligations in a well known approach to multiagent systems (i.e. AOP). Third, we offer our view on how a set of deontic operators might be fruitfully employed in the analysis of multiagent systems, and how a particular combination of them may be used to avoid the problems in AOP. 1 Published in Aamodt, Agnar and Komorowski, Jan (eds); SCAI'95 -- Fifth Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence; Trondheim May 29 -- 31, 1995; ISO Press; Amsterdam, 1995. pp. 19 -- 30. ISBN 90-5199-221-1. 232 MEDLAR II Deliverable V.2--3 1 Motivation On its never ending search for information, the internet agent Hugin-13 approaches a promising source at Yggdrasil.no. The guarding agent Mime-7 intervenes, and the two agents go into conversation m...

In this paper we present a Gentzen system for reasoning with contraryto -duty obligations. The intuition behind the system is that a contraryto -duty is a special kind of normative exception. The logical machinery to formalize this idea is taken from substructural logics and it is based on the definition of a new non-classical connective capturing the notion of reparational obligation. Then the system is tested against well-known contrary-to-duty paradoxes.

This paper investigates the semantic treatment of conditional obligation,

. In this paper we discuss the role of context and independence in normative reasoning. First, deontic operators -- obligations, prohibitions, permissions -- referring to the ideal context may conflict with operators referring to a violation (or contrary-to-duty) context. Second, deontic independence is a powerful concept to derive deontic operators from such operators of other violation contexts. These two concepts are used to determine how to proceed once a norm has been violated, a key issue of deontic logic applications in computer science. We also show how violation contexts and deontic independence can be used to give a new analysis of several notorious paradoxes of deontic logic. 1 Introduction Deontic logic is a modal logic in which flp is read as `p ought to be (done),' Fp as `p is forbidden to be (done)' and Pp as `p is permitted to be (done).' Deontic logic has traditionally been used by philosophers to analyze the structure of the normative use of language. In the eightie...

In this paper, we will show how dynamic logic can be used to reason about so-called sub-ideal states, i.e. states in which some deontic constraint is violated. For this purpose we have to extend the definition of the deontic operators. Instead of only giving a postcondition with respect to violations for each action we will consider the complete state transition. In order to distinguish between different states of violation we will also index the violation predicates. The introduction of these two extensions makes it possible to reason in a flexible and natural way about sub-ideal states.