Norms are expectations of an agent about the behavior of other agents in
the society. The human society follows norms such as wait in queues and
giving gifts at birthdays. Norms are of interest to researchers because they
help to improve the predictability of the society.
Multi Agent Systems (MAS) are formed by a set of agents that interact
in an environment to engage goals that can be individuals or collective. In
these systems norms improve cooperation and coordination between agents
and reduce the computation time required by agents to the decision-making
process. Also limits the search space since agents shouldn't perform actions
that violate the norms of the running environment.
Usually it is complicated to de ne norms due to the complexity of the
systems and dynamicity of the environment. In Open MAS, agents (devel-
oped by di erent companies) compete against each other and it is hard to
ensure that all them will behave as expected, this di cult the decision of
which norms should be set. Therefore, tools to test and evaluate agent's
behavior using norms are needed and a way of doing it is through simulated
environments.
The purpose of this thesis is to extend the functionalities of the Packet
World simulator by implementing a test bed where norms could be easily
added and modi ed in order to evaluate the di erent outcomes of these
norms. With the Normative Packet World developed, some norms where proposed and evaluated.
The layout of this work follows the following structure; in section 2
we give a brief overview of the Packet Work architecture, in section 3 we
explain the proposed extension of the system, in section 4 we present the
laws already implemented in the Packet World and the institutional norms
and norms added, in section 5 we detail the agent's normative behavior
developed to test the norms, in section 6 the results of di erent experiments
are explained and in section 7 the conclusions of this work are presented.
