Eliminating opportunism using an epistemic mechanism

Opportunism is a behavior that takes advantage of knowledge asymmetry and results in promoting agents' own value and demoting other agents' value. It is important to eliminate such a selfish behavior in multi-agent systems, as it has undesirable results for the participating agents. However, as the context we study here is multi-agent systems, system designers actually might not be aware of the value system for each agent thus they have no idea whether an agent will perform opportunistic behavior. Given this fact, this paper designs an epistemic mechanism to eliminate opportunism given a set of possible value systems for the participating agents: An agent's knowledge gets updated so that the other agent is not able to perform opportunistic behavior, and there exists a balance between eliminating opportunism and respecting agents' privacy

Transition systems, metric spaces and ready sets in the semantics of uniform concurrency

AbstractTransition systems as proposed by Hennessy and Plotkin are defined for a series of three languages featuring concurrency. The first has shuffle and local nondeterminacy, the second synchronization merge and local nondeterminacy, and the third synchronization merge and global nondeterminacy. The languages are all uniform in the sense that the elementary actions are uninterpreted. Throughout, infinite behaviour is taken into account and modelled with infinitary languages in the sense of Nivat. A comparison with denotational semantics is provided. For the first two languages, a linear time model suffices; for the third language a branching time model with processes in the sense of de Bakker and Zucker is described. In the comparison an important role is played by an intermediate semantics in the style of Hoare and Olderog's specification oriented semantics. A variant on the notion of ready set is employed here. Precise statements are given relating the various semantics terms of a number of abstraction operators