Norms for Typing MAS Multi-Agent Systems

Software infrastructures are quickly changing, becoming more and more global, pervasive and autonomic. Computing is becoming ubiquitous, with embedded and distributed devices interacting with each other. MAS have been recognized to be a promising paradigm for this kind of scenarios, however, the more the complexity of programming these systems will increase, the more the need for effective tools for reasoning on properties of programs is noticed. Some examples are the recent proposals for introducing types in agent languages. Types provide abstractions to perform sophisticated forms of program analysis and verifications that help programmers to face the complexity of their job. In this presentation we discuss how norms represented by commitments can be used for typing MAS and why they are a promising tool.