Request-Guarantee Agents and their Check-Transform-Enforce Processes

Abstract

We introduce Check-Transfer-Enforce Systems (CTEs) as a general model of behavior of (semi-)autonomous agents, based on the idea of distinguishing the ability of an agent to change its state from the actual changes that can be performed under contextual constraints. In this model, based on many-sorted term algebras, a Request-Guarantee (qg)-agent is characterised by a collection of moves specifying which terms are requested to be present in the current state of the agents and which terms are guaranteed to be present in the successor state, if the move is executed. We show how this approach allows an encoding and a generalisation of a number of well-known existing models. The approach is naturally extended to the case of pairs of communicating qg-agents. An abstract view of the approach can be given in the setting of enriched categories.

Paolo Bottoni

Professor of Computer Science

Paolo Bottoni currently works at the Department of Computer Science, Sapienza University of Rome. Paolo does research in Human-computer Interaction and Software Engineering. His current projects are about Combination of cost estimation methods and Theory of Annotations.