Representing and Evaluating Electronic Contracts with Normative Markov Decision Processes

This position paper summarizes the contributions resulting from the short term scientific mission (STSM) of the first author, from University Rey Juan Carlos, to the Kings College London. During this scientific mission, we have studied the impact of norms on the sequential decision making of rational agents, and how they can be modelled and quantitatively assessed. For this purpose, we put forward a framework based on Markov Decision Processes that allows for explicitly representing norms and sanctions. In order to illustrate the usage of the framework, we model an example in a simulated aerospace aftermarket ruled by electronic contracts in terms of norms and sanctions, and present algorithms for reasoning about it.