Managing Conflicts Between Individuals and Societies in Multi-agent Systems.

The development of multi-agent systems (MAS) implies considering both the social and individual levels of these systems. However, the elements in these levels are not necessarily consistent. Conflicts can arise between the goals of the community and those of individual agents. These contradictions are potentially very complex, given the inherent intentional nature of agents and the interactive features of their societies. Developers can face these problems about contradictions with traditional software engineering verification techniques. Nevertheless, these techniques always depend on the understanding of developers about what properties to check. Abstractions of the agent paradigm offer a new possibility for verification: the use of expert knowledge from social sciences to detect and solve this kind of problems. Social sciences and MAS research share a similar view about their objects of study: societies of intentional actors. With this basis, it is possible to adapt the expertise of social sciences to the study of MAS, providing a new source of knowledge for the verification of MAS focused in their social and intentional features. Based on our previous research, we have developed a method to solve motivational contradictions with one of these social theories, the Activity Theory. This method is explained with a case study about the management of a bookstore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]