Interleaved contractions

We study an approach to concurrent contractions, that is, to simultaneous contractions performed by multiple agents. Using ideas from the semantics of programming we adopt an interleaved approach to reason about concurrent contractions. Although many of the notions from the traditional Gaerdenfors approach transfer to this setting, our approach also forces us to depart from the Gaerdenfors framework in important ways. We present laws describing rational concurrent contractions, as well as a construction that satisfies these laws

A verification framework for agent programming with declarative goals

AbstractA long and lasting problem in agent research has been to close the gap between agent logics and agent programming frameworks. The main reason for this problem of establishing a link between agent logics and agent programming frameworks is identified and explained by the fact that agent programming frameworks have hardly incorporated the concept of a declarative goal. Instead, such frameworks have focused mainly on plans or goals-to-do instead of the end goals to be realised which are also called goals-to-be. In this paper, the programming language GOAL is introduced which incorporates such declarative goals. The notion of a commitment strategy—one of the main theoretical insights due to agent logics, which explains the relation between beliefs and goals—is used to construct a computational semantics for GOAL. Finally, a proof theory for proving properties of GOAL agents is introduced. Thus, the main contribution of this paper, rather than the language GOAL itself, is that we offer a complete theory of agent programming in the sense that our theory provides both for a programming framework and a programming logic for such agents. An example program is proven correct by using this programming logic