Norms are used in open Multi-Agent Systems asa formal specification of deontic statements aimed at regulating the actions of agents and the interactions among them. In this paper, we propose a set of services facilitating the development of both non-normative and normative agents for norm-governed MAS. Specifically, we propose to provide agents with norm reasoning services. These services will help agent designers/developers to programme agents that consider norm reasoning without having to implement the needed mechanisms to reason about norms by themselves. This article shows how these services perform as well as the results of the experiments that we conducted to evaluate their performance.

Natalia Criado was awarded a FPU scholarship AP-2007-01256 by the spanish government. This work has also been partially funded by grants CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00022, TIN2009-13839-C03-01. This research has also been partially funded by Valencian Prometeo project 2008/051.