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Recent studies have focused on autonomous agents that select their own goals and then select actions to achieve these goals, using online Goal Reasoning (GR). GR agents can revise goals and plans at execution time if unexpected outcomes occur. However, for ethical or legal agent design, even the partial execution of an online plan may result in foreseeable norm violations. To prevent these violations, it is crucial to incorporate GR already at the planning phase. To this end, we design an offline GR system that can harbour normative systems or deontic logics for goal generation. Our main results include a characterization and comparison of the completeness classes for a variety of offline GR planners, and a discussion of the irreducibility of offline GR to pure planning methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An autonomous system is constructed by a manufacturer, operates in a society subject to norms and laws, and interacts with end users. All of these actors are stakeholders affected by the behavior of the autonomous system. We address the challenge of how the ethical views of such stakeholders can be integrated in the behavior of an autonomous system. We propose an ethical recommendation component called Jiminy which uses techniques from normative systems and formal argumentation to reach moral agreements among stakeholders. A Jiminy represents the ethical views of each stakeholder by using normative systems, and has three ways of resolving moral dilemmas that involve the opinions of the stakeholders. First, the Jiminy considers how the arguments of the stakeholders relate to one another, which may already resolve the dilemma. Secondly, the Jiminy combines the normative systems of the stakeholders such that the combined expertise of the stakeholders may resolve the dilemma. Thirdly, and only if these two other methods have failed, the Jiminy uses context-sensitive rules to decide which of the stakeholders take preference over the others. At the abstract level, these three methods are characterized by adding arguments, adding attacks between arguments, and revising attacks between arguments. We show how a Jiminy can be used not only for ethical reasoning and collaborative decision-making, but also to provide explanations about ethical behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A gossip protocol is a procedure for spreading secrets among a group of agents, using a connection graph. In each call between a pair of connected agents, the two agents share all the secrets they have learnt. In dynamic gossip problems, dynamic connection graphs are enabled by permitting agents to spread as well the telephone numbers of other agents they know. This paper characterizes different distributed epistemic protocols in terms of the (largest) class of graphs where each protocol is successful, i.e. where the protocol necessarily ends up with all agents knowing all secrets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]