Relating Goal and Commitment Semantics

Whereas commitments capture how an agent relates with another agent, (private) goals describe states of the world that an agent is motivated to bring about. Researchers have observed that goals and commitments are complementary, but have not yet developed a combined operational semantics for them. This paper makes steps towards such a semantics by relating the respective lifecycles of goals and commitments. We study how the the concepts cohere for one agent and how they engender cooperation between agents. We illustrate our approach via a real-world scenario in the domain of aerospace aftermarket services. We state how our semantics yields important desirable properties, including convergence of the configurations of cooperating agents, thereby delineating some theoretically well-founded yet practical modes of cooperation in a multiagent system.