Bounded-Monitor Placement in Normative Environments

In order to sanction non-compliant agents, norm violations must be detected, which in turn requires norm monitoring. This paper examines the problem of monitor placement within a normative multi-agent system under budgetary constraints. More specifically we consider a system containing (1) a set of possible monitors able to determine the state of a subset of the domain; (2) costs associated with deploying the monitors; and (3) a set of norms for which compliance must be monitored, and which, if violated, result in a penalty. We seek to identify which combination of monitors maximizes the system’s utility. We formalize the problem and evaluate approximate solutions using several heuristics, empirically demonstrating their efficiency.