

Coordination is a central problem in multi-agent systems. Social laws (or normative systems) have emerged as a natural and powerful paradigm for coordinating multi-agent systems. The social laws paradigm exposes the whole spectrum between fully centralised and fully decentralised coordination mechanisms. A social law is, intuitively, a constraint on the behaviour of agents, which ensures that their individual behaviours are compatible. Typically, a social law is imposed off-line, minimising the chances of on-line conflict or the need to negotiate. The tutorial gives an overview of the state-of-the-art in research on the use of social laws for coordination. It discusses questions such as: how can a social law that ensures some particular global behaviour be automatically constructed? If two social laws achieve the same objective, which one should we use? How can we construct a social law that works even if some agents do not comply? Which agents are most important for a social law to achieve its objective? It turns out that to answer questions like these, we can apply a range of tools available from the interdisciplinary tool chest of multi-agent systems. The tutorial also gives instruction in research practices and methodology in multi-agent systems: what are key research questions of interest, and what are some of the most important methods employed in this interdisciplinary field? To answer the latter question, the tutorial exemplifies of how, e.g., formal logic, game theory, voting theory and complexity theory, can be used, and in particular how these frameworks can be combined.