Dynamic Specifications in Norm-Governed Open Computational Societies

A defining characteristic of Open Computational Societies is the unpredictable behaviour of their participants, resulting from their operational and architectural heterogeneity. This has led to the development of computational frameworks that facilitate the declaration of agent specifications in terms of normative relations. The frameworks offer modelling, simulation and validation, but typically have not supported dynamic modification of the specification at runtime by the agents themselves. This omission can be a limitation in certain scenarios, where agents might be capable of adaptation when faced with unexpected stimuli, but the specifications under which they operate did not allow for it. In this paper we extend an existing normative computational framework to facilitate well-defined dynamic normative modification of a specification by the agents themselves, given a well-defined meta-specification. We complement the framework with a mathematical model of the 'specification space'. We argue that the introduced dynamism preserves several of the advantages of static normative frameworks while allowing for more flexible, highly autonomous systems, simpler specification authoring and generic protocol reuse.