Computational logics and verification techniques of multi-agent commitments: survey

Abstract

Agent communication languages (ACLs) are fundamental mechanisms that enable agents in multi-agent systems totalk, communicate with each other in order to satisfy their individual and social goals in a cooperative and competitive manner. Social approaches are advocated to overcome the shortcomings of ACL semantics delineated by using mental approaches in the figure of agents’ mental notions. Over the last two decades,socialcommitments have been the subject of considerable research in some of those social approaches as they provide a powerful representation for modeling and reasoning upon multi-agent interactions in the form of mutual contractual obligations. They particularly provide a declarative, flexible, verifiable, and social semantics for ACL messages while respecting agents’ autonomy, heterogeneity, and openness.In this manuscript, we go through prominent and predominate proposals in the literature to explore the state of the art on how temporal logics can be devoted to define a formal semantics for ACL messages in terms of social commitments and associated actions. We explain each proposal and point out if and how it meetssevencrucial criteria, four of them introduced by Munindar P. Singh to have a well-defined semantics for ACL messages. Far from deciding the best proposal, our aim is to present the advantages (strengths) and limitations of those proposals to designers and developers using a concrete running example and to compare between them, so that they can make the best choice with regard to their needs. We explore and evaluate current specification languages and different verification techniques that have been discussed within those proposals to, respectively, specify and verify commitment-based protocols. We also investigate logical languages of actions advocated to specify, model, and execute commitment-based protocols in other contributed proposals. Finally, we suggest some solutions that can contribute to address the identified limitations.

Nova : Value-based Negotiation of Norms

“…Moreover, norms and normative conflicts have been investigated in the context of verification. El-Menshawy et al [2015] survey research on verification, including model checking to monitor the satisfaction or violation of commitments. Giannikis and Daskalopulu [2011] take a centralized perspective where reasoning on contracts are performed by a single entity that has a global view of the environment.…”

Monitoring norms: a multi-disciplinary perspective

“…Similar stances have been taken in cognate domains such as business processes and web services (Pesic & van der Aalst, 2006; van der Aalst & Pesic, 2006; Montali, Pesic, et al ., 2010). Moreover, the definition of interaction protocols or norms by way logical formulas enables exploiting a number of verification tools (El-Menshawy et al ., 2015). Formalisms used to define protocols and norms include temporal logics (Bulling et al ., 2013), the EC (Kowalski & Sergot, 1985) the reactive EC (REC) (Chesani et al ., 2010), the lightweight coordination calculus (LCC) (Robertson, 2004), frameworks supporting social semantics for agent communication such as the SCIFF language of social expectations (Alberti et al ., 2008), commitment manipulation languages (Singh, 1998) such as the EC-based one proposed by Yolum and Singh (2002) and REC-based commitment manipulation language (Torroni, Chesani, et al ., 2009), contract specification languages such as defeasible logic-based business contract language (Governatori & Pham, 2009) and, especially in the context of norms, deontic logic (von Wright, 1951).…”