An architecture of a normative system: counts-as conditionals, obligations and permissions

Normative systems are traditionally described and analyzed using deontic logic, describing the logical relations among obligations and permissions. However, there is still a gap between deontic logic and normative multi-agent systems such as electronic institutions, which may be seen as an instance of the gap between on the one hand logical agent specification languages and on the other hand agent architectures and programming languages. To bridge the gap, in this paper we propose an architecture containing separate subsystems or components for counts-as conditionals, conditional obligations and conditional permissions. We add a norm database component in which the three kinds of rules are stored, and we use a channel based coordination model to describe the relations among the four normative components.