Behavioural Abstraction of Agent Models Addressing Mutual Interaction of Cognitive and Affective Processes

In this paper the issue of relating a specification of the internal processes within an agent to a specification of the behaviour of the agent is addressed. A previously proposed approach for automated generation of behavioural specifications from an internal specification was limited to stratified specifications of internal processes. Therefore, it cannot be applied to mutually interacting cognitive and affective processes described by interacting loops. However, such processes are not rare in agent models addressing integration of cognitive and affective processes, agent learning and adaptation. In this paper a novel approach is proposed which addresses this issue. The proposed technique for loop abstraction is based on identifying dependencies of equilibrium states for interacting loops. The technique is illustrated by an example of an internal agent model with interdependent processes of believing, feeling, and trusting.