Commitments with regulations: reasoning about safety and control in REGULA

Commitments provide a flexible means for specifying the business relationships among autonomous and heterogeneous agents, and lead to a natural way of enacting such relationships. However, current formalizations of commitments incorporate conditions expressed as propositions, but disregard (1) temporal regulations and (2) an agent’s control over such regulations. Thus, they cannot handle realistic application scenarios where time and control are often central because of domain conventions or other requirements. We propose a new formalization of commitments that builds on an existing representation of events in which we can naturally express temporal regulations as well as what an agent can control, including indirectly as based on the commitments and capabilities of other agents. Our formalization supports a notion of commitment safety. A benefit of our consolidated approach is that by incorporating these considerations into commitments we enable agents to reason about and flexib...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Elisa Marengo, Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Amit K. Chopra, Viviana Patti, Munindar P. Singh
• Keywords: Application Scenarios, ATAL 2011, Formal Semantics, Intelligent Agents, Study Categories