Heterogeneous Active Agents, III: Polynomially Implementable Agents

Abstract

. In (Eiter, Subrahmanian, and Pick 1999), the authors have introduced techniques to build agents on top of arbitrary data structures, and to "agentize" new/existing programs. They provided a series of successively more sophisticated semantics for such agent systems, and showed that as these semantics become epistemically more desirable, a computational price may need to be paid. In this paper, we identify a class of agents that are called weak regular---this is done by first identifying a fragment of agent programs (Eiter, Subrahmanian, and Pick 1999) called weak regular agent programs (WRAPs for short). It is shown that WRAPs are definable via three parameters---checking for a property called "safety", checking for a property called "conflict freedom" and checking for a "deontic stratifiability" property. Algorithms for each of these are developed. A weak regular agent is then defined in terms of these concepts , and a regular agent is one that satisfies an additional "boundedness" ..