Reasoning about Actions, Knowledge and Normative Ability

Abstract

The past five years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the use of cooperation logics for reasoning about multi-agent systems. Since the development of ATL, there are many multi-agent cooperation logics developed as an extension to ATL. The cooperation logic called the Normative Alternating-time Temporal Epistemic Logic (NATEL ) is developed to extend ATL. Four key contributions have been made. Firstly, the strong and unrealistic assumption of the other two extended cooperation logics of ATL (ATEL, NATL*) that different agents are not allowed to control the same actions have been done away with. Secondly, functions that involved actions are given in more detail, so that the relations between actions and knowledge, actions and agents, actions and states can be researched in depth and separately. Thirdly, actions, knowledge and normative ability can be represented in the object language other than only in the underlying semantics. Lastly, since actions, knowledge and normative ability are taken into account at the same time, the expressive power and flexibility of NATEL are much richer than the other two extended cooperation logics of ATL.