Maintenance commitments: Conception, semantics, and coherence

Abstract

Social commitments are recognized as an abstraction that enables flexible coordination between autonomous agents. We make these contributions. First, we introduce and formalize a concept of a maintenance commitment, a kind of social commitment characterized by a maintenance condition whose truthhood an agent commits to maintain. This concept of maintenance commitments enables us to capture a richer variety of real-world scenarios than possible using achievement commitments with a temporal condition. Second, we develop a rule-based operational semantics, by which we study the relationship between agents' achievement and maintenance goals, achievement commitments, and maintenance commitments. Third, we motivate a notion of coherence between an agents' achievement and maintenance cognitive and social constructs, and prove that, under specified conditions, the goals and commitments of both rational agents individually and of a multiagent system altogether are coherent. Fourth, we illustrate our approach with a detailed real-world scenario from an aerospace aftermarket domain.