Heterogeneous temporal probabilistic agents

Abstract

To date, there has been no work on temporal probabilistic agent reasoning on top of heterogeneous legacy databases and software modules. We will define the concept of a heterogeneous temporal probabilistic (HTP) agent. Such agents can be built on top of existing databases, data structures, and software code bases without explicitly accessing the internal code of those systems and can take actions compatible with a policy or operating principles specified by an agent developer. We will develop a formal semantics for such agents through the notion of a feasible temporal probabilistic status interpretation (FTPSI for short). Intuitively, an FTPSI specifies what all an HTP agent is permitted/forbidden/obliged to do at various times t. As changes occur in the environment, the HTP agent must compute a new FTPSI. HTP agents continuously compute FTPSI's in order to determine what they should do and hence, the problem of computing FTPSI's is very important. We give a sound and complete algorithm to compute FTPSI's for a very large class of HTP agents called strict HTP agents. In a given state, many FTPSI's may exist. These represent alternative courses of action that the HTP agent can take. We provide a notion of an optimal FTPSI that selects an FTPSI optimising an objective function and give a sound and complete algorithm to compute an optimal FTPSI.

Annotated Probabilistic Temporal Logic

“…No implementation was proposed and thus no experimental results were studied. Dix et al [2006] provided a logic programming language within which agents that reason about time and uncertainty could be encoded. Such agents could make statements about when they were obliged/permitted to take certain actions and when they were forbidden from doing so.…”

“…Heterogeneous temporal probabilistic agents (HTP-agents) [Dix et al 2006] allow us to make statements about the permissions/obligations and forbidden actions that an agent may take at future times if some condition is true now or in the future. Though temporal probabilistic logics have been studied extensively for many years, there is less work on temporal probabilistic logic programs and, until this article, there has not been a single prototype implementation and/or experimental result.…”

Multi-Agent Programming

“…However all these features have been investigated (see [65,64,63,70,72]) and the approach using both temporal as well as probabilistic reasoning is currently implemented. The basic language of IMPACT does not allow to formalise mental attitudes, or temporal or probabilistic reasoning.…”

“…Several examples and screenshots Included here are taken from the book and the following papers [63,65,71,61]. The authors would like to thank their co-authors for their permission to use material from these papers.…”

Detecting and repairing anomalous evolutions in noisy environments

“…In order to deal with the uncertainty that arises from noisy sensors, probabilistic approaches have been proposed (see, e.g., [9,10,14,15,23,24,54,55,60,69,73]) where evolutions are represented by means of dynamic systems in which transitions among possible states are determined in terms of probability distributions. Other approaches refer to some logic formalization (see, e.g., modal logics, action languages, logic programming, and situation calculus [5,39,42,44,72,74]) in which a logical theory is augmented to deal quantitatively and/or qualitatively with reliability information about sensors.…”