Equivalence of defeasible normative systems

Abstract

Normative systems have been advocated as an effective tool to regulate interaction in multi-agent systems. The use of deontic operators and the ability to represent defeasible information are known to be two fundamental ingredients to represent and reason about normative systems. In this paper, after introducing a framework that combines standard deontic logic and non-monotonic logic programming, deontic logic programs (DLP), we tackle the fundamental problem of equivalence between normative systems using a deontic extension of David Pearce’s Equilibrium Logic and its monotonic basis, the logic of Here-and-There. We also show how deontic logic programs can be used to represent and reason about normative systems, and establish a strong connection with input-output logic.