An Experiment in Formalizing Commitments Using Action Languages

This paper investigates the use of high-level action languages for representing and reasoning about commitments in mulit-agent domains. The paper introduces the language L mt with features motivates by the problem of representing commitments; in particular, it shows how L mt can handle both simple commitment actions and complex commitment protocols. The semantics of L mt provides a uniform solution to different problems in reasoning about commitments, e.g., the problem of (i) verifying whether an agent fails (or succeeds) to deliver on its commitments; (ii) identifying pending commitments; and (iii) suggesting ways to satisfy pending commitments.