Negotiating Socially Optimal Allocations of Resources

A multiagent system may be thought of as an artificial society of autonomous software agents and we can apply concepts borrowed from welfare economics and social choice theory to assess the social welfare of such an agent society. In this paper, we study an abstract negotiation framework where agents can agree on multilateral deals to exchange bundles of indivisible resources. We then analyse how these deals affect social welfare for different instances of the basic framework and different interpretations of the concept of social welfare itself. In particular, we show how certain classes of deals are both sufficient and necessary to guarantee that a socially optimal allocation of resources will be reached eventually

The CIFF Proof Procedure for Abductive Logic Programming with Constraints: Theory, Implementation and Experiments

We present the CIFF proof procedure for abductive logic programming with constraints, and we prove its correctness. CIFF is an extension of the IFF proof procedure for abductive logic programming, relaxing the original restrictions over variable quantification (allowedness conditions) and incorporating a constraint solver to deal with numerical constraints as in constraint logic programming. Finally, we describe the CIFF system, comparing it with state of the art abductive systems and answer set solvers and showing how to use it to program some applications. (To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming - TPLP)

Negotiating socially optimal allocations of resources

Published versio

Direct and indirect aboutness topics

We propose a definition of aboutness topicality that not only encompasses individual denoting DPs, but also indefinites. We concentrate on the interpretative effects of marking indefinites as topics: they either receive widest scope in their clause, or they are interpreted in the restrictor of an overt or covert Q-adverb. We show that in the first case they are direct aboutness topics insofar as they are the subject of a predication expressed by the comment, while in the second case they are indirect aboutness topics: they define the subject of a higher-order predication — namely the set of situations that the respective Q-adverb quantifies over

Competence Checking for the Global E-Service Society Using Games

We study the problem of checking the competence of communicative agents operating in a global society in order to receive and offer electronic services. Such a society will be composed of local sub-societies that will often be semi-open, viz., entrance of agents in a semi-open society is conditional to specific admission criteria. Assuming that a candidate agent provides an abstract description of their communicative skills, we present a test that a controller agent could perform in order to decide if a candidate agent should be admitted. We formulate this test by revisiting an existing knowledge representation framework based on games specified as extended logic programs. The resulting framework finds useful application in complex and inter-operable web-services construed as semi-open societies in support of the global vision known as the Semantic Web