Prognostic normative reasoning

Abstract

Human users planning for multiple objectives in complex environments are subjected to high levels of cognitive workload, which can severely impair the quality of the plans created. This article describes a software agent that can proactively assist cognitively overloaded users by providing normative reasoning about prohibitions and obligations so that the user can focus on her primary objectives. In order to provide proactive assistance, we develop the notion of prognostic normative reasoning (PNR) that consists of the following steps: 1) recognizing the user’s planned activities, 2) reasoning about norms to evaluate those predicted activities, and 3) providing necessary assistance so that the user’s activities are consistent with norms. The idea of PNR integrates various AI techniques-namely, user intention recognition, normative reasoning over a user’s intention, and planning, execution and replanning for assistive actions. In this article, we describe an agent architecture for PNR and discuss practical applications.