On-line reasoning for institutionally-situated BDI agents

摘要

Institutions offer the promise of a means to govern open systems, in particular, open multi-agent systems. Research in logics and their derived tools now support the specification, verification and enactment of institutions (or organizations, depending on the terminology of the tool). Most effort to date has tended to focus on the static properties of institutions, such as whether a particular state of affairs is reachable or not from a given set of initial conditions. Such models are useful in forcing the designer to state their intentions precisely, and for testing (static) properties. We call this off-line reasoning. We identify two problems in the direct utilization of off-line models in the governance of live systems: (i) static model artefacts that are typically aspects of agent behaviour in the dynamic model (ii) over-specification of constraints on actions, leading to undue limitation of agent autonomy. Agents need to be able to query an institution for (dynamic) properties. We call this online reasoning. In this paper we present a methodology to extract the on-line specification from an off-line one and use it to support BDI agents to realize a norm-governed multi-agent system.