Programming Rational Agents in a Modal Action Logic

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Martelli

et al. 2006

Self Cite

Abstract. In open multi-agent systems agent interaction is usually ruled by public protocols defining the rules the agents should respect in message exchanging. The respect of such rules guarantees interoperability. Given two agents that agree on using a certain protocol for their interaction, a crucial issue (known as "a priori conformance test") is verifying if their interaction policies, i.e. the programs that encode their communicative behavior, will actually produce interactions which are conformant to the agreed protocol. An issue that is not always made clear in the existing proposals for conformance tests is whether the test preserves agents' capability of interacting, besides certifying the legality of their possible conversations. This work proposes an approach to the verification of a priori conformance, of an agent's conversation policy to a protocol, which is based on the theory of formal languages. The conformance test is based on the acceptance of both the policy and the protocol by a special finite state automaton and it guarantees the interoperability of agents that are individually proved conformant. Many protocols used in multi-agent systems can be expressed as finite state automata, so this approach can be applied to a wide variety of cases with the proviso that both the protocol specification and the protocol implementation can be translated into finite state automata. In this sense the approach is general. Easy applicability to the case when a logic-based language is used to implement the policies is shown by means of a concrete example, in which the language DyLOG, based on computational logic, is used.

Section: The Dylog Language: a Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Verification of Protocol Conformance and Agent Interoperability

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Martelli

et al. 2006

Self Cite

“…DyLOG [5] is a high-level logic programming language for modeling rational agents, based upon a modal logic of actions and mental attitudes where modalities are used for representing actions as well as beliefs that are in the agent's mental state. It accounts both for atomic and complex actions, or procedures, for specifying the agent behavior.…”

Section: Specification Of Communication In Dylogmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this work we tackle the problem of conformance verification for two specific languages: we use Agent UML (AUML for short, first specified in [27]) as the interaction protocol specification language and DyLOG [3,5] as the conversation policy implementation language. In the literature one can, actually, find many formal techniques for protocol specification.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, in our work we perform hypothetical reasoning about the effects of conversations on the agent mental state, in order to find conversation plans which are proved to respect the implemented protocols, achieving at the same time some desired goal. The DyLOG language is briefly introduced in Section 2, for a thorough description of it see [5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Verifying Protocol Conformance for Logic-Based Communicating Agents

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Martelli

et al. 2005

Self Cite

Abstract. Communication plays a fundamental role in multi-agents systems. One of the main issues in the design of agent interaction protocols is the verification that a given protocol implementation is "conformant" w.r.t. the abstract specification of it. In this work we tackle those aspects of the conformance verification issue, that regard the dependence/independence of conformance from the agent private state in the case of logic, individual agents, set in a multi-agent framework. We do this by working on a specific agent programming language, DyLOG, and by focussing on interaction protocol specifications described by AUML sequence diagrams. By showing how AUML sequence diagrams can be translated into regular grammars and, then, by interpreting the problem of conformance as a problem of language inclusion, we describe a method for automatically verifying a form of "structural" conformance; such a process is shown to be decidable and an upper bound of its complexity is given. We also give a set of properties that describes the influence of the agent private information on the conformance of its communication policies to protocol specifications.

Reasoning About Agents’ Interaction Protocols Inside DCaseLP

Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies II

Gungui

et al. 2005

Abstract. Engineering systems of heterogeneous agents is a difficult task; one of the ways for achieving the successful industrial deployment of agent technology is the development of engineering tools that support the developer in all the steps of design and implementation. In this work we focus on the problem of supporting the design of agent interaction protocols by carrying out a methodological integration of the MAS prototyping environment DCaseLP with the agent programming language DyLOG for reasoning about action and change.