Timed Concurrent Language for Argumentation: An Interleaving Approach

Abstract

Time is a crucial factor in modelling dynamic behaviours of intelligent agents: activities have a determined temporal duration in a real-world environment, and previous actions influence agents' behaviour. In this paper, we propose a language for modelling concurrent interaction between agents that also allows the specification of temporal intervals in which particular actions occur. Such a language exploits a timed version of Abstract Argumentation Frameworks to realise a shared memory used by the agents to communicate and reason on the acceptability of their beliefs with respect to a given time interval. An interleaving model on a single processor is used for basic computation steps, with maximum parallelism for time elapsing. Following this approach, only one of the enabled agents is executed at each moment. To demonstrate the capabilities of language, we also show how it can be used to model interactions such as debates and dialogue games taking place between intelligent agents. Lastly, we present an implementation of the language that can be accessed via a web interface. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

A concurrent language for modelling agents arguing on a shared argumentation space

“…We want to point out that a version of the language also incorporating the notion of time has been studied in [12][13][14] (see Section 6 for a more careful description). However, such a timed extension will not be addressed in this paper, which instead focuses on the basic formalism of cla.…”

“…A timed version of cla has been studied in [12,13] with the introduction of constructs allowing for the specification of temporal intervals in which actions occur. Expressions, for instance, are endowed with timeouts that, once expired, make the execution terminate with failure.…”

“…An interleaving model on a single processor is adopted instead in [14] for basic cla computation steps. Contrary to maximum parallelism, the interleaving approach limits the number of enabled agents executed at a time, mimicking the limited number of available processors as in the real world: only one of the enabled agents is executed at each instant of time, while all the other agents may have to wait for the processor to be free.…”