Norm-based distributed controllers in a Multi-Agent System

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles will most likely participate in traffic in the near future. These autonomous vehicles have private goals they want to achieve, which might conflict with the goals of the traffic system designers. To ensure that the goals of the system are met, the vehicle behavior needs to be influenced. Since the vehicles are autonomous, their behavior cannot be controlled directly. One way of influencing behavior indirectly is through norms. A norm is a violable rule that describes correct behavior. Vehicles who do not comply with the norm may receive a sanction, such as a monetary fine. The norms are issued to the vehicles by traffic control systems, which monitor the vehicles and sanction them when norm violations are detected. In this thesis, we present a formal model and a corresponding implementation for a norm-based multi-agent system for traffic. We created a formal model of vehicles, traffic regulations and traffic controllers and implemented this in an extension of a state-of-the-art traffic simulator named SUMO. The features of this extension are presented in several demonstrative experiments.