Situation awareness and ability in coalitions

This paper proposes a discussion on the formal links between the Situation Calculus and the semantics of interpreted systems as far as they relate to Higher-Level Information Fusion tasks. Among these tasks Situation Analysis require to be able to reason about the decision processes of coalitions. Indeed in higher levels of information fusion, one not only need to know that a certain proposition is true (or that it has a certain numerical measure attached), but rather needs to model the circumstances under which this validity holds as well as agents' properties and constraints. In a previous paper the authors have proposed to use the Interpreted System semantics as a potential candidate for the unification of all levels of information fusion. In the present work we show how the proposed framework allow to bind reasoning about courses of action and Situation Awareness. We propose in this paper a (1) model of coalition, (2) a model of ability in the situation calculus language and (3) a model of situation awareness in the interpreted systems semantics. Combining the advantages of both Situation Calculus and the Interpreted Systems semantics, we show how the Situation Calculus can be framed into the Interpreted Systems semantics. We illustrate on the example of RAP compilation in a coalition context, how ability and situation awareness interact and what benefit is gained. Finally, we conclude this study with a discussion on possible future works

Grounding power on actions and mental attitudes

International audienceThe main objective of this work is to develop a logic called IAL (Intentional Agency Logic) in which we can reason about mental states of agents, action occurrences, and agentive and group powers. IAL will be exploited for a formal analysis of different forms of power such as an agent i's power of achieving a certain result and an agent i's power over another agent j (alias social power)

An Abstract Formal Basis for Digital Crowds

Crowdsourcing, together with its related approaches, has become very popular in recent years. All crowdsourcing processes involve the participation of a digital crowd, a large number of people that access a single Internet platform or shared service. In this paper we explore the possibility of applying formal methods, typically used for the verification of software and hardware systems, in analysing the behaviour of a digital crowd. More precisely, we provide a formal description language for specifying digital crowds. We represent digital crowds in which the agents do not directly communicate with each other. We further show how this specification can provide the basis for sophisticated formal methods, in particular formal verification.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figure

Distribution of goals addressed to a group of agents

The problem investigated in this paper is the distribution of goals addressed to a group of rational agents. Those agents are characterized by their ability (i.e. what they can do), their knowledge about the world and their commitments. The goals of the group are represented by conditional preferences. In order to deduce the actual goals of the group, we determine its ability using each agent’s ability and we suppose that the agents share a common knowledge about the world. The individual goals of an agent are deduced using its ability, the knowledge it has about the world, its own commitments and the commitments of the other agents of the group

Observation-based Model for BDI-Agents

We present a new computational model of BDI-agents, called the observation-based BDI-model. The key point of this BDI-model is to express agents' beliefs, desires and intentions as a set of runs (computing paths), which is exactly a system in the interpreted system model, a well-known agent model due to Halpern and his colleagues. Our BDI-model is computationally grounded in that we are able to associate the BDI-agent model with a computer program, and formulas, involving agents' beliefs, desires (goals) and intentions, can be understood as properties of program computations. We present a sound and complete proof system with respect to our BDI-model and explore how symbolic model checking techniques can be applied to model checking BDI-agents. In order to make our BDI-model more flexible and practically realistic, we generalize it so that agents can have multiple sources of beliefs, goals and intentions

Coalition based approach for shop floor agility – a multiagent approach

Dissertation submitted for a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, speciality of Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaThis thesis addresses the problem of shop floor agility. In order to cope with the disturbances and uncertainties that characterise the current business scenarios faced by manufacturing companies, the capability of their shop floors needs to be improved quickly, such that these shop floors may be adapted, changed or become easily modifiable (shop floor reengineering). One of the critical elements in any shop floor reengineering process is the way the control/supervision architecture is changed or modified to accommodate for the new processes and equipment. This thesis, therefore, proposes an architecture to support the fast adaptation or changes in the control/supervision architecture. This architecture postulates that manufacturing systems are no more than compositions of modularised manufacturing components whose interactions when aggregated are governed by contractual mechanisms that favour configuration over reprogramming. A multiagent based reference architecture called Coalition Based Approach for Shop floor Agility – CoBASA, was created to support fast adaptation and changes of shop floor control architectures with minimal effort. The coalitions are composed of agentified manufacturing components (modules), whose relationships within the coalitions are governed by contracts that are configured whenever a coalition is established. Creating and changing a coalition do not involve programming effort because it only requires changes to the contract that regulates it

A finer grained modeling of rational coalitions using goals

We propose an extension of Coalitional ATL (a logic for reasoning about coalitions and their formation process, see [10]) by goals. This goal framework allows for a finer grained modeling of coalitions: Coalitional frameworks, based on Dungs’s abstract argumentation framework, are used to point out conflicts between agents, and goals refer to agents’ subjective incentives to join (or not to join) coalitions. We focus on two different aspects for cooperation allowing a more practical modeling of systemsWorkshop de Agentes y Sistemas Inteligentes (WASI)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

A survey of agent-oriented methodologies

This article introduces the current agent-oriented methodologies. It discusses what approaches have been followed (mainly extending existing object oriented and knowledge engineering methodologies), the suitability of these approaches for agent modelling, and some conclusions drawn from the survey

Severity-sensitive norm-governed multi-agent planning

This research was funded by Selex ES. The software developed during this research, including the norm analysis and planning algorithms, the simulator and harbour protection scenario used during evaluation is freely available from doi:10.5258/SOTON/D0139Peer reviewedPublisher PD