The complexity of achievement and maintenance problems in agent-based systems

Stewart, Ian

doi:10.1016/s0004-3702(03)00014-6

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…When the task description is PSPACE-complete, verification is PSPACE-complete as well. Stewart extends and sharpens those results, by studying achievement and maintenance agent design problems in bounded problems, when these problems are parameterized by the number of environment states and the number of agent actions [51]. Action effects are history-dependent and specified by a polynomial-time Turing Machine.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…In computer science, this problem is called synthesis, but we follow the literature about agents and use the term "agent design" [19,51]. We want to determine whether agents can indeed be implemented in order to satisfy the protocol.…”

Section: Agent Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Agent verification is often called model checking [44], whereas agent design is classically referred to as synthesis [3,45]. In this paper, we use the term "agent design", following Dunne and Wooldridge [19,59], and Stewart [51].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The computational complexity of scenario-based agent verification and design

Bontemps

Schobbens

2007

Journal of Applied Logic

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We first advocate that the AUML (Agent Unified Modeling Language) notation, even in its new version, is not precise enough to adequately describe protocols. This problem was long identified by Harel and we propose to follow his solution: extend sequence diagrams with a "prechart", i.e. single out the initiation sequence of the protocol. This new notation keeps readability and intuition, but is also technically adequate and is given a formal semantics. It actually is a form of simple temporal logics, equipped with a game-based semantics, which is appropriate for modeling agent-based systems. We then go on to study its complexity. Unsurprisingly, the version with protocol roles is undecidable. The main interesting problem is to synthesize agents that follow the protocol described. Surprisingly, it is undecidable even if we remove roles, alternatives, loops, asynchronous communication, conditions, constraints, negations (already removed in AUML). The complexity of checking whether a society of agents obeys a protocol given in this trivial notation is also surprisingly high: it is PSPACE-complete, like temporal logic, while we show that this simple language is strongly less expressive than temporal logic. Notations in-between have the expected increase in expressiveness, but no increase in complexity. This justifies the use of a language including alternatives, asynchronous communication and conditions, since it increases expressiveness with no cost in complexity.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 77%

Section: Agent Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The computational complexity of scenario-based agent verification and design

Bontemps

Schobbens

2007

Journal of Applied Logic

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“…Various work has been done on the computational complexity of verifying if a given swarm-like system can perform a task and designing such systems for tasks. The systems so treated include groups of agents [11,20,24], robots [8,16], game-pieces [12], and tiles [1]. Much of this work, e.g., [1,8,12,16] assumes that the entities being moved cannot sense, plan, or move autonomously.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Much of this work, e.g., [1,8,12,16] assumes that the entities being moved cannot sense, plan, or move autonomously. In the work where entities do have these abilities, e.g., [11,20,24], the formalizations of control mechanisms and environments are very general and powerful (e.g., arbitrary Turing machines or Boolean propositional formulae), rendering both the intractability of these problems unsurprising and the derived results unenlightening with respect to possible restrictions that could yield tractability. Only one complexity-theoretic work to date incorporates both autonomous robots and a suitably simple and explicit model of robot architecture and environment [22].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploruing Algorithmic Options for the Efficient Design and Reconfiguration of Reactive Robot Swarms

Wareham¹

2016

Proceedings of the 9th EAI International Conference on Bio-Inspired Information and Communications Technologies (Formerly BIONE

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A key challenge in robot swarm engineering is the design of individual robot controllers such that the robots as a group can perform a specified task. In this paper, we explore algorithmic options for designing and reconfiguring swarms of synchronous reactive robots to perform a joint navigation / morphogenesis task in a known world. Our results show that neither of these problems can be solved both efficiently and correctly either in general or relative to a surprisingly large number of restrictions on robot and swarm architecture. We also give restrictions under which these problems can be solved both efficiently and correctly.

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The Computational Complexity of Controller-Environment Co-design Using Library Selection for Distributed Construction

Timmar

Wareham

2019

Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems

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Creating specified structures through the coordinated efforts of teams of simple autonomous robots is a significant problem in distributed robotics. All previous effort, both empirical and theoretical, has focused on the problems of designing either controllers or environments which, in tandem with given environments or controllers, built the specified structures. In this paper, we give the results of the first computational and parameterized complexity analyses of the controller-environment co-design problem in the simple case where teams of finite-state robots are designed by selecting controllers from a given library. We show that this problem cannot be solved efficiently in general or under a number of restrictions, and give the first restrictions under which this problem is efficiently solvable.We also consider two elaborations on this problem. First, we analyze the controllerenvironment co-design problem under a new architecture in which robots have a transient memory. Second, we give the first definitions of and derive computational complexity results for stigmergy-related parameters for the controller-environment co-design problem. ii Acknowledgements I would like to express my profound gratitude to Dr. Todd Wareham, my research supervisor, for his academic guidance, untiring support, research grant and his valuable and constructive feedback of this research work. His readiness to accommodate me whenever possible and to help me throughout my research work is much appreciated.

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The complexity of achievement and maintenance problems in agent-based systems

Cited by 10 publications

References 12 publications

The computational complexity of scenario-based agent verification and design

The computational complexity of scenario-based agent verification and design

Exploruing Algorithmic Options for the Efficient Design and Reconfiguration of Reactive Robot Swarms

The Computational Complexity of Controller-Environment Co-design Using Library Selection for Distributed Construction

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