Contextual Reasoning in the Verification of PRS Agent Programs

Although software agents are becoming more widely used, methodology for constructing agent programs is poorly understood. In this paper, we take a step towards specifying and proving correctness for a class of agent programs based on the PRS architecture, Georgeff and Lansky (1987), one of the most widely used in industrial settings. We view PRS as a simplified operating system, capable of running concurrently a series of plans, each of which at any time is in a state of partial execution. The PRS system is construed as using a simplified interrupt mechanism that enables it, using information about goal priorities, to "recover" from various contingencies so that the blocked plans can be resumed and eventually successfully completed. We develop a simple methodology for PRS program construction, then present a formalism combining dynamic logic and context-based reasoning that can be used to reason about such PRS plans.