A Qualitative Approach to Composing Value-Aligned Norm Systems

Research in normative multi-agent systems has explored several approaches to compute the norm system (set of norms) required to make coordination possible. More recently, norm selection supposes an already available collection of norms from which to select a norm system to enact. A key aspect in this selection process is the consideration of moral values together with preferences among them, thus the selection follows the principle: the more preferred the values promoted by a norm system, the more preferred the norm system. Unfortunately, norm selection follows a quantitative approach despite the qualitative nature of the information available to the decision maker. In this paper we provide a novel qualitative approach to norm selection by formalising the process to infer a norm system ranking from the value preferences. We provide an encoding of this qualitative problem into a linear program and show that their solutions are equivalent.