A Coupled Operational Semantics for Goals and Commitments

Abstract

Commitments capture how an agent relates to another agent, whereas goals describe states of the world that an agent is motivated to bring about. Commitments are elements of the social state of a set of agents whereas goals are elements of the private states of individual agents. It makes intuitive sense that goals and commitments are understood as being complementary to each other. More importantly, an agent's goals and commitments ought to be coherent, in the sense that an agent's goals would lead it to adopt or modify relevant commitments and an agent's commitments would lead it to adopt or modify relevant goals. However, despite the intuitive naturalness of the above connections, they have not been adequately studied in a formal framework. This article provides a combined operational semantics for goals and commitments by relating their respective life cycles as a basis for how these concepts (1) cohere for an individual agent and (2) engender cooperation among agents. Our semantics yields important desirable properties of convergence of the configurations of cooperating agents, thereby delineating some theoretically well-founded yet practical modes of cooperation in a multiagent system.

Coupling purposes with status-functions in artificial institutions

“…In the proposed model, purposes compose a system (i) explicit, as it is properly specified through institutional concepts and (ii) external, as it is persisted outside the agents mind. Such conception is in agreement with some authors that point that institutions can (or perhaps even should) be used for purposes that are beyond the normative ones [28,13,32,33,21,23]. In summary, our work proposes an interface to make different couplings in different institutions without changing the institutional specification or the coding of the agents.…”

A Conceptual Model for Situating Purposes in Artificial Institutions

“…Such conception is in agreement with some authors that signaled that an institution can (or perhaps even should) be used for purposes other than just normative. We were inspired in some works that suggest that an artificial institution has been used to other purposes without be normative [28,7,45,46,47,48]. In summary, our work proposes an interface to make different couplings in different institutions without changing the institutional specification or the coding of the agents.…”

Maintenance of Social Commitments in Multiagent Systems

“…We adopt achievement commitment and achievement goal as defined by Telang, Singh, and Yorke-Smith (2019), hereinafter TSY, denoting achievement commitments by C and achievement goals by G. We adopt and enhance TSY's definitions of state functions, maximal sets, and consistency.…”

“…Recent research characterizes coherence between a rational agent's (achievement) commitments and its (achievement) goals (Telang, Singh, and Yorke-Smith 2019). Building on this approach, we motivate an enhanced notion of coherence and with it study the synergy between an agent's maintenance commitments and its achievement and maintenance goals.…”