Modelling communicating agents in timed reasoning logics

Abstract. Practical reasoners are resource-bounded—in particular they require time to derive consequences of their knowledge. Building on the Timed Reasoning Logics (TRL) framework introduced in [1], we show how to represent the time required by an agent to reach a given conclusion. TRL allows us to model the kinds of rule application and conflict resolution strategies commonly found in rule-based agents, and we show how the choice of strategy can influence the information an agent can take into account when making decisions at a particular point in time. We prove general completeness and decidability results for TRL, and analyse the impact of communication in an example system consisting of two agents which use different conflict resolution strategies.