Formal approaches to modelling and verifying resource-bounded agents-state of the art and future prospects

This paper reviews formal approaches to modelling and verifying resource-bounded agents focusing on state of the Art and future prospects

Logic for coalitions with bounded resources

Recent work on Alternating-Time Temporal Logic and Coalition Logic has allowed the expression of many interesting properties of coalitions and strategies. However, there is no natural way of expressing resource requirements in these logics. In this article, we present a Resource-Bounded Coalition Logic (RBCL) that has explicit representation of resource bounds in the language. We give a complete and sound axiomatization of RBCL, a procedure for deciding satisfiability of RBCL formulas, and a model-checking algorithm. © 2010 The Author

Approximate Assertional Reasoning Over Expressive Ontologies

In this thesis, approximate reasoning methods for scalable assertional reasoning are provided whose computational properties can be established in a well-understood way, namely in terms of soundness and completeness, and whose quality can be analyzed in terms of statistical measurements, namely recall and precision. The basic idea of these approximate reasoning methods is to speed up reasoning by trading off the quality of reasoning results against increased speed

Model checking ontology-driven reasoning agents using strategy and abstraction

We present a framework for the modelling, specification and verification of ontology-driven multi-agent rule-based systems (MASs). We assume that each agent executes in a separate process and that they communicate via message passing. The proposed approach makes use of abstract specifications to model the behaviour of some of the agents in the system, and exploits information about the reasoning strategy adopted by the agents. Abstract specifications are given as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas which describe the external behaviour of the agents, allowing their temporal behaviour to be compactly modelled. Both abstraction and strategy have been combined in an automated model checking encoding tool Tovrba for rule-based multi-agent systems which allows the system designer to specify information about agents' interaction, behaviour, and execution strategy at different levels of abstraction. The Tovrba tool generates an encoding of the system for the Maude LTL model checker, allowing properties of the system to be verified

Verifying requirements for resource-bounded agents

This thesis presents frameworks for the modelling and verification of resource-bounded reasoning agents. The resources considered include the time, memory, and communication bandwidth required by agents to achieve a goal. The scalability and expressiveness of standard model checking techniques is investigated using two typical multiagent reasoning problems which can be easily parameterised to increase or decrease the problem size. Both a complexity analysis and experimental results suggest that reasonably sized problem instances are unlikely to be tractable for a standard model checker without steps to reduce the branching factor of the state space. We propose two approaches to address this problem: the use of abstract specifications to model the behaviour of some of the agents in the system, and exploiting information about the reasoning strategy adopted by the agents. Abstract specifications are given as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulae which describe the external behaviour of the agents, allowing their temporal behaviour to be compactly modelled. Conversely, reasoning strategies allow the detailed specification of the ordering of steps in the agent’s reasoning process. Both approaches have been combined in an automated verification tool TVRBA for rule-based multi-agent systems which allows the designer to specify information about agents’ interaction, behaviour, and execution strategy at different levels of abstraction. The TVRBA tool generates an encoding of the system for the Maude LTL model checker, allowing properties of the system to be verified. The scalability of the new approach is illustrated using three case studies

SWI-Prolog and the Web

Where Prolog is commonly seen as a component in a Web application that is either embedded or communicates using a proprietary protocol, we propose an architecture where Prolog communicates to other components in a Web application using the standard HTTP protocol. By avoiding embedding in external Web servers development and deployment become much easier. To support this architecture, in addition to the transfer protocol, we must also support parsing, representing and generating the key Web document types such as HTML, XML and RDF. This paper motivates the design decisions in the libraries and extensions to Prolog for handling Web documents and protocols. The design has been guided by the requirement to handle large documents efficiently. The described libraries support a wide range of Web applications ranging from HTML and XML documents to Semantic Web RDF processing. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)Comment: 31 pages, 24 figures and 2 tables. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP

Verifying requirements for resource-bounded agents

This thesis presents frameworks for the modelling and verification of resource-bounded reasoning agents. The resources considered include the time, memory, and communication bandwidth required by agents to achieve a goal. The scalability and expressiveness of standard model checking techniques is investigated using two typical multiagent reasoning problems which can be easily parameterised to increase or decrease the problem size. Both a complexity analysis and experimental results suggest that reasonably sized problem instances are unlikely to be tractable for a standard model checker without steps to reduce the branching factor of the state space. We propose two approaches to address this problem: the use of abstract specifications to model the behaviour of some of the agents in the system, and exploiting information about the reasoning strategy adopted by the agents. Abstract specifications are given as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulae which describe the external behaviour of the agents, allowing their temporal behaviour to be compactly modelled. Conversely, reasoning strategies allow the detailed specification of the ordering of steps in the agent’s reasoning process. Both approaches have been combined in an automated verification tool TVRBA for rule-based multi-agent systems which allows the designer to specify information about agents’ interaction, behaviour, and execution strategy at different levels of abstraction. The TVRBA tool generates an encoding of the system for the Maude LTL model checker, allowing properties of the system to be verified. The scalability of the new approach is illustrated using three case studies

A Logical Framework for the Representation and Verification of Context-aware Agents

© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York. We propose a logical framework for modelling and verifying context-aware multi-agent systems. We extend CTL∗ with belief and communication modalities, and the resulting logic 𝓛OCRS allows us to describe a set of rule-based reasoning agents with bound on time, memory and communication. The set of rules which are used to model a desired systems is derived from OWL 2 RL ontologies. We provide an axiomatization of the logic and prove it is sound and complete. We show how Maude rewriting system can be used to encode and verify interesting properties of 𝓛OCRS models using existing model checking techniques

Tractable approximate deduction for OWL

Acknowledgements This work has been partially supported by the European project Marrying Ontologies and Software Technologies (EU ICT2008-216691), the European project Knowledge Driven Data Exploitation (EU FP7/IAPP2011-286348), the UK EPSRC project WhatIf (EP/J014354/1). The authors thank Prof. Ian Horrocks and Dr. Giorgos Stoilos for their helpful discussion on role subsumptions. The authors thank Rafael S. Gonçalves et al. for providing their hotspots ontologies. The authors also thank BoC-group for providing their ADOxx Metamodelling ontologies.Peer reviewedPostprin