Answer Set Programming for Representing and Reasoning About Virtual Institutions

Abstract

Abstract. It is recognised that institutions are potentially powerful means for making agent interactions effective and efficient, but institutions will only really be useful when, as in other safety-critical scenarios, it is possible to prove that particular properties do or do not hold for all possible encounters. In contrast to symbolic model-checking, answer set programming permits the statement of problems and queries in domain-specific terms as executable logic programs, thus eliminating the gap between specification and verification language. Furthermore, results are presented in the same terms. In this paper we describe the use of answer set programs as an institutional modelling technique. We demonstrate that our institutional model can be intuitively be mapped into an answer set program such that the ordered event traces of the former can be obtained as the answer sets of the latter, allowing for an easy way to query properties of models.

Executable specification of open multi-agent systems

“…Several approaches have been proposed in the literature for the specification of open MASsee, for example, [4,5,42,64,3,75,6,74,41,32,14,11,35,77]. An influential approach has been the work of Moses, Shoham, Tennenholtz and colleagues [49,50,67,68,73,25].…”

“…According to this example, a consumer may be empowered to accept a quote (see Example 4) but forbidden to exercise this power if it cannot afford the associated price. Exercising this power will create a contract (see axiom (11)) but the consumer may be subject to penalty for violating this prohibition.…”

“…Consequently, according to axioms (9) and (10), ag 3 become empowered at time-point 16 to accept the quote of ag 1 . Indeed, ag 3 accepted the quote of ag 1 at time-point 22, thus establishing a contract between them (see axiom (11)), creating a bundle of powers, permissions and obligations for them. At time-point 24 ag 1 sent the goods to the Intermediation Server (iServer ) while at the next time-point ag 3 attempted to withdraw from the consume role: ag 3 sent a withdraw message to the role assigning authority raa.…”

Instrumentalization of Norm-regulated Transition System Situations

“…Cliffe et al use Answer Set Programming (ASP) for representing institutional norms, as part of the representation and analysis of specifications of agent-based institutions. [1,2] In Deontic Petri nets, and variants thereof such as Organizational Petri nets, varying degrees of 'ideal' or 'sub-ideal' (more or less 'allowed' or 'preferred') behaviour is modeled by preference orderings on executions of Petri nets; see for example [23,3].…”

Specifying and Reasoning About Multiple Institutions

“…In this paper, we extend the formal specification of single institutions in [4] to multiinstitutions. We present a top-down approach to virtual multi-institutions, in which external normative concepts are represented in forms that at the same time designers may analyse (off-line) and about which agents may reason (on-line).…”