擬真代理人被廣泛地運用在數位娛樂及教育等領域內。為了能表現出類似人類的行為，了解社會脈絡的能力對擬真代理人而言具有相當的重要性。一般將社會脈絡融入代理人的方法是，程式設計人員預先將社會關係寫入各個代理人內。這樣的作法有一很大的限制，即缺乏彈性及易讀寫性。這樣的代理人不易接受在社會關係上可能出現的變化，而劇情設計者也難以從整體的角度去設計及辨別代理人間的社會關係。然而，要直接設計可理解變動社會脈絡的代理人，主要的挑戰來自於如何建構對代理人及設計者雙方都同樣能理解的社會模型，並且此模型不會在執行時因遇到變化而解體。
在這篇論文中，我結合知識本體論的架構以及社會約束子的概念，提出可讓設計者從整體角度設計，又可讓代理人察覺個體間關係的社會模型。以此目的而言，本論文有三大貢獻。第一，我以社會約束子為主體，設計出可辦別個體關係與制度關係的社會先驗圖，藉由改變約束子與社會關係的關連，可允許社會脈絡的變化。其次，我描述約束子可如何與代理人架構整合，使其能帶領代理人產生社會行為，卻又不嚴格禁止代理人在必要時違反約束子的限制。最後，我提出一個可在不同社會約束子間偵測衝突的演算法，以供代理人做進一步的決策制定。我列舉數個模擬代理人的思考過程以證明此模型可將代理人置入社會脈絡之中。

The ability to acknowledge social context is of importance to believable agents that wish to express human-like characteristics for applications ranging from digital entertainment to education. The traditional approach for incorporating social context into agents is for system builders to script the social relations with each individual agent. A major limitation of this scripting approach is its lack of flexibility and accessibility – such agents can hardly adapt the social context to possible changes in social relations, whereas scenario designers have difficulties to author and identify social relations in a macroscopic perspective. A central challenge for believable agents aware of dynamic social context is to establish social models that are readily understood by the agents as such by the authors, and able to undertake changes in runtime without the risk of falling apart.
In this thesis, I integrate the form of ontology with the idea of social constraints to propose a social model that allows designers to author the social context in the global view, and allow agents to retrieve individual social relations. To that end, the thesis makes three central contributions. First, I design a social schema that identifies individual relations and institutional rules in terms of social constraints to permit changes in the social model. Second, I describe how these constraints can be incorporated into agent architecture in a way that guides the agent to generate social behaviors without strictly preventing agents from violating social constraints when necessary. Finally, I present a conflict detection algorithm that reasons about different social constraints to support a further process of decision making. I provide illustrations of deliberation processes to justify how this model can situate agents in the social context.

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