Maintenance commitments: Conception, semantics, and coherence

Pankaj R. Telang, Munindar P. Singh, Neil Yorke-Smith

Abstract:

Social commitments are recognized as an abstraction that enables flexible coordination be-
tween autonomous agents. We make these contributions. First, we introduce and formalize
a concept of a maintenance commitment, a kind of social commitment characterized by a
maintenance condition whose truthhood an agent commits to maintain. This concept of
maintenance commitments enables us to capture a richer variety of real-world scenarios
than possible using achievement commitments with a temporal condition. Second, we de-
velop a rule-based operational semantics, by which we study the relationship between
agents’ achievement and maintenance goals, achievement commitments, and maintenance
commitments. Third, we motivate a notion of coherence between an agents’ achievement
and maintenance cognitive and social constructs, and prove that, under specified condi-
tions, the goals and commitments of both rational agents individually and of a multiagent
system altogether are coherent. Fourth, we illustrate our approach with a detailed real-
world scenario from an aerospace aftermarket domain.