Collective obligations and agents Who gets the blame.pdfVIP

Collective Obligations and Agents: Who Gets the Blame? D. Grossi1, F. Dignum1, L. Royakkers2, and J.-J. Ch. Meyer1 1Utrecht University, The Netherlands {davide,dignum,jj}@cs.uu.nl 2Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands L.M.M.Royakkers@tm.tue.nl 1 Introduction In multi-agent systems, the cooperation between agents is an important issue. For that purpose several theories have been developed about joint goals, plans and intentions. All these joint attitudes try to capture some of the team ele- ments of agents that work together. In this paper we follow up on that work and will look at collective obligations. What are the consequences for an agent if the group in which an agent performs its tasks gets an obligation to fulfill a certain goal? E.g. a program committee of DEON’04 may have the collective obliga- tion to review all submitted papers before a certain time. We are interested to explore how this collective obligation translates into individual obligations for the program committee members, e.g. review two or three papers, and the extra obligations for the program chair to divide the papers and monitor the process and make final decisions. In [11], the collective obligation is formalized in a framework of deontic logic, which gives the opportunity to express which agent (or which group of agents) has the responsibility to bring about a certain situation (to express group liabil- ity, e.g. liability for a trading partnership) and to express the relation between the agents of a group. However, in the theory developed in [11] we cannot express the individual responsibility that follows from the task to achieve the fulfillment of the collective obligation. A consequence is that we cannot indicate which individual is responsible for a violation of a collective obligation. We believe that the main differences between individual and collective obliga- tions can be explained through the distribution of responsibility and knowledge. If an individual has an o