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Governing intelligent virtual agent behaviour with norms

One requirement by which virtual environments (VEs) are judged, is the believability of the virtual agents (VAs). One aspect of believability, is that agent responses to situations should not create cognitive dissonance and thereby distract the observer. One approach to this problem is the use of institutional models providing social reasoning, in conjunction with classical AI techniques providing individual reasoning, to achieve the appropriate recognition of complex situations and provide guidance on the subsequent choice of action(s). We present a distributed approach that offers governance-rather than regimentation-of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) situated in a VE. We aim to show that the combination of an institution providing social reasoning and BDI agents providing individual reasoning, establishes a framework for enhancing believability through the interplay between: (i) the institution and IVAs in VEs, and (ii) norms maintained by the institution and the mental states of IVAs. From an engineering point of view, the framework provides a separation of concerns because the BDI agent is augmented with the capacity to process social obligations, while the specification and verification of social structure resides in the institutional models.