Social norms have become one of the most promising approaches toward ensuring a desirable social outcome in multi-agent systems. In these systems, autonomous and heterogeneous agents work toward common or different goals. Norms regulate the behaviour of these agents by defining obligations and prohibitions, and by creating rewards and penalties to encourage the agents to behave so as to meet these norms. Although the use of norms is a promising mechanism to regulate the agents’ behavior, the development of agents able to join an agents society, to adopt the norms and to work with them autonomously has shown to be significantly more challenging than traditional agents. The reason for this difficulty is the lack of agent models that allow developing of autonomous agents able to cope with issues related to norms. In this thesis, we introduce an approach to develop agents able to deal with normative questions in an autonomous way. The approach extends the Belief-Desire- Intention model including functions that assist the agent in adopting new norms, in verifying norm activation, deactivation, fulfillment and violation, in selecting the norms to be fulfilled or violated by the agent, in identifying and overcoming conflicts among norms, in generating new goals from norms and in selecting goals, plans and intentions while taking into account the system norms. In addition, the approach provides mechanisms that are necessary to implement agents designed from the proposed architectural model. Two scenarios are used in order to exemplify the proposed approach. The first is related to the planning of rescue missions regulated by norms. The second is related to the support to software development regulated by norms. Finally, experiments that demonstrate the importance of developing agent by using the proposed architectural model, both in the agent and society point of view, are presented.