How Do Agents Comply with Norms?

The import of the notion of institution in the design of MASs requires to develop formal and efficient methods for modeling the interaction between agents' behaviour and normative systems. This paper discusses how to check whether agents' behaviour complies with the rules regulating them. The key point of our approach is that compliance is a relationship between two sets of specifications: the specifications for executing a process and the specifications regulating it. We propose a formalism for describing both the semantics of normative specifications and the semantics of compliance checking procedures.