Motivations

The autonomous decision capability embedded in software or robot agents is one of the major issues of Artificial Intelligence. It is a core property for AI applications such as e-commerce, serious games, ambient computing, social or collective robotics, companion robots, unmanned vehicles.

Autonomous agents decide and act in a given context or environment and under domain constraints, and possibly interact with other agents or human beings e.g. to share tasks or to execute tasks on behalf of others. It is thus important to define regulation and control mechanisms to ensure sound and consistent behaviours both at the agent’s individual level and at the multi-agent level. Organisation models, conversation policies, normative systems, constraints, logical frameworks address the problem of how agents’ autonomous behaviours should be controlled, paving the way for formal or pragmatic definitions of agents’ Rights and Duties. The issue is all the more important as autonomous agents may encounter new situations, evolve in open environments, interact with agents based on different design principles, act on behalf of human beings and share common resources. For instance: should an autonomous agent take over the control from a human operator? under which circumstances?

The aim of this workshop is to promote discussions and exchanges on the different issues raised by autonomous agents’ Rights and Duties and models that can be proposed to represent and reason on Rights and Duties.

Workshop Format