Interactions as Social Practices: towards a formalization
This work addresses the need for improved modeling approaches in multi-agent systems to handle interdependencies among heterogeneous parties like software agents, robots, and humans, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing concepts.
The paper tackles the challenge of modeling complex social interactions in multi-agent systems by proposing a formalization of a social framework based on Social Practices, which specify expected behavior in social contexts to facilitate agents' practical reasoning.
Multi-agent models are a suitable starting point to model complex social interactions. However, as the complexity of the systems increase, we argue that novel modeling approaches are needed that can deal with inter-dependencies at different levels of society, where many heterogeneous parties (software agents, robots, humans) are interacting and reacting to each other. In this paper, we present a formalization of a social framework for agents based in the concept of Social Practices as high level specifications of normal (expected) behavior in a given social context. We argue that social practices facilitate the practical reasoning of agents in standard social interactions.