An Agent View on Law

Problem solving by autonomous, interacting computer systems has attracted much attention in the Artificial Intelligence community. These autonomous computer systems, called agents, provide a promising perspective for the legal knowledge-based systems community, as legal problem solving often involves distributed problem solving capabilities that go beyond the capabilities of individual knowledge-based systems. We focus on the coordination of agents and communication between agents by proposing a model of communication between various agents using modelling techniques such as communication primitives and state transition diagrams. Our representation concerns the Dutch Algemene Wet Bestuursrecht (AWB; General Act on Administrative Law). A proposal for an agent architecture describes how these communication aspects can be incorporated into an architecture.