A formal framework for specifying and developing agents/robots must handle not only knowledge and sensing actions, but also time and concurrency. Researchers have extended the situation calculus to handle knowledge and sensing actions. Other researchers have addressed the issue of adding time and concurrent actions. Here both of these features are combined into a unified logical theory of knowl...

Software architecture constitutes the primary design of a software system. Consequently, architectural design decisions involved in architecture design have a key impact on the system in such aspects as future maintenance costs, resulting quality, and timeliness. However, the applied knowledge employed and the design decisions taken by soihvare architects are not explicitly represented in the d...

•Describing actions and their effects in a dynamic system •A set of first-order axioms, mainly includes: Dap (precondition axioms): For each A(~x), Poss(A(~x), s) ≡ φA(~x, s) Dssa (successor state axioms): For each fluent F (~y, s), F (~y, do(a, s)) ≡ ∨ iψ + i (~y, a, s) ∨ F (~y, s) ∧ ¬( ∨ j ψ − j (~y, a, s)) DS0 (an initial theory): All facts hold in the initial situation S0 Duna (unique name ...

We propose an action formalism that is based on description logics (DLs) and may be viewed as an instance of the Situation Calculus (SitCalc). In particular, description logic concepts can be used for describing the state of the world, and the preand post-conditions of actions. The main advantage of such a combination is that, on the one hand, the expressive power for describing world states an...

A team of agents is jointly able to achieve a goal if despite any incomplete knowledge they may have about the world or each other, they still know enough to be able to get to a goal state. Unlike in the single-agent case, the mere existence of a working plan is not enough as there may be several incompatible working plans and the agents may not be able to choose a share that coordinates with t...

This paper presents an argumentation mechanism for reconciling conflicts between planning agents related to plan proposals, which are caused by inconsistencies between basic beliefs regarding the state of the world or the specification of the planning operators. We introduce simple and efficient argument moves that enable discussion about planning steps, and show how these can be integrated int...

We present a method to derive a solution to the combined frame and ramification problems for certain classes of theories of action written in the situation calculus. The theories of action considered include the causal laws of the domain, in the form of a set of effect axioms, as well as a set of ramification state constraints. The causal laws state the direct effects that actions have on the w...

Agent supervision is a form of control / customization where a supervisor restricts the behavior of an agent to enforce certain requirements, while leaving the agent as much autonomy as possible. In this work, we investigate supervision of an agent that may acquire new knowledge about her environment during execution, for example, by sensing. Thus we consider an agent’s online executions, where...

Indirect genetics effects (IGEs)--when the genotype of one individual affects the phenotypic expression of a trait in another--may alter evolutionary trajectories beyond that predicted by standard quantitative genetic theory as a consequence of genotypic evolution of the social environment. For IGEs to occur, the trait of interest must respond to one or more indicator traits in interacting cons...