Bases for an Action Logic to Model Negative Modes of Actions

Currently available systems of action deontic logic are not designed to model procedures to assess the conduct of an agent which take into account the intentions of the agent and the circumstances in which she is acting. Yet, procedures of this kind are essential to determine what counts as culpable not doing. In light of this, we design an action logic, AL, in which it is possible to distinguish actions that are objectively possible for an agent, viz. there are no objective impediments for the agent to do them, and actions that, besides being objectively possible, are compatible with the setting or intentions of the agent

Refinement Modal Logic

In this paper we present {\em refinement modal logic}. A refinement is like a bisimulation, except that from the three relational requirements only `atoms' and `back' need to be satisfied. Our logic contains a new operator 'all' in addition to the standard modalities 'box' for each agent. The operator 'all' acts as a quantifier over the set of all refinements of a given model. As a variation on a bisimulation quantifier, this refinement operator or refinement quantifier 'all' can be seen as quantifying over a variable not occurring in the formula bound by it. The logic combines the simplicity of multi-agent modal logic with some powers of monadic second-order quantification. We present a sound and complete axiomatization of multi-agent refinement modal logic. We also present an extension of the logic to the modal mu-calculus, and an axiomatization for the single-agent version of this logic. Examples and applications are also discussed: to software verification and design (the set of agents can also be seen as a set of actions), and to dynamic epistemic logic. We further give detailed results on the complexity of satisfiability, and on succinctness

A Component-oriented Framework for Autonomous Agents

The design of a complex system warrants a compositional methodology, i.e., composing simple components to obtain a larger system that exhibits their collective behavior in a meaningful way. We propose an automaton-based paradigm for compositional design of such systems where an action is accompanied by one or more preferences. At run-time, these preferences provide a natural fallback mechanism for the component, while at design-time they can be used to reason about the behavior of the component in an uncertain physical world. Using structures that tell us how to compose preferences and actions, we can compose formal representations of individual components or agents to obtain a representation of the composed system. We extend Linear Temporal Logic with two unary connectives that reflect the compositional structure of the actions, and show how it can be used to diagnose undesired behavior by tracing the falsification of a specification back to one or more culpable components

The Effectual Design Method for Internationalizing Architectural and Engineering Services: Insights from Swiss Design Entrepreneurs

This research explores the use of effectual and causal design logic in architectural and engineering design internationalization. Specifically, it aims to understand how individual design entrepreneurs act across three international opportunity design problem spaces: (a) formation, (b) evaluation, and (c) exploitation. This qualitative multiple-case study employed phenomenographic, semi-structured interviews with 17 Swiss architectural and engineering design entrepreneurs. The findings indicate that international opportunity formation is created via the dominant effectual design logic principle; international opportunity evaluation mainly applies causal design logic; and international opportunity exploitation primarily uses actions combining effectual and causal design logic principles. This research contributes to the architectural and engineering design internationalization literature, which focuses only on causal design logic and provides a practical integrative model for successful international architectural and engineering design services

Intelligent Products: Shifting the Production Control Logic in Construction (With Lean and BIM)

Production management and control in construction has not been addressed/updated ever since the introduction of Critical Path Method and the Last Planner® system. The predominant outside-in control logic and a fragmented and deep supply chain in construction significantly affect the efficiency over a lifecycle. In a construction project, a large number of organisations interact with the product throughout the process, requiring a significant amount of information handling and synchronisation between these organisations. However, due to the deep supply chains and problems with lack of information integration, the information flow down across the lifecycle poses a significant challenge. This research proposes a product centric system, where the control logic of the production process is embedded within the individual components from the design phase. The solution is enabled by a number of technologies and tools such as Building Information Modelling, Internet of Things, Messaging Systems and within the conceptual process framework of Lean Construction. The vision encompasses the lifecycle of projects from design to construction and maintenance, where the products can interact with the environment and its actors through various stages supporting a variety of actions. The vision and the tools and technologies required to support it are described in this pape

Shadow economy revisited: logic, morality and intuition in corrupt practices and illegal channels

The aim of the paper is to analyze how corruption contributes to the spread of shadow economy and damages viable economic development of any country. The unfreedoms that are created under the conditions of illegal transactions and corrupt practices considerably limit the opportunities of individuals to develop and use their capabilities (Sen, 2000) to the full extent and make their contribution to the development of their countries’ economies and sociocultural progress. The short-sighted desire to receive gain and extra revenue through illegal actions often obscures the capacity to comprehend the size and extent of the damage that such actions bring to the economic development of the country and sociocultural progress of the society in the long run. Under these conditions, the paper perceives logic (e.g. cost-benefit analysis, pragmatic calculations of profit-making, etc.), morality (i.e. ethical norms) and intuition (i.e. the intuitive decision whether to engage in illegal practices, where the estimation of the degrees of risk and confidence plays significant role) as three important human features that influence individuals’, corporations’ and governments’ decisions whether or not to engage directly or foster indirectly the cultivation of illegal practices. Therefore, the idea that the paper is trying to support is that while analyzing the instances of corruption on any given level (individual, organizational, governmental, or cross-country), the factors of logic, moral and intuition should be all taken into consideration in order to better understand such illegal actions, systems, channels and mechanisms and design more comprehensive fighting strategies against corruption than are offered today by numerous scholars, organizations or public bodies.shadow economy; unofficial GDP; illegal income; corruption; illegal contracts and channels; economic development; economic growth; logic; ethical values; risk evaluation; intuition; corruption on individual, corporate and governmental levels.

Probabilistic Plan Synthesis for Coupled Multi-Agent Systems

This paper presents a fully automated procedure for controller synthesis for multi-agent systems under the presence of uncertainties. We model the motion of each of the $N$ agents in the environment as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and we assign to each agent one individual high-level formula given in Probabilistic Computational Tree Logic (PCTL). Each agent may need to collaborate with other agents in order to achieve a task. The collaboration is imposed by sharing actions between the agents. We aim to design local control policies such that each agent satisfies its individual PCTL formula. The proposed algorithm builds on clustering the agents, MDP products construction and controller policies design. We show that our approach has better computational complexity than the centralized case, which traditionally suffers from very high computational demands.Comment: IFAC WC 2017, Toulouse, Franc