Timed Concurrent Language for Argumentation: An Interleaving Approach

Abstract

AbstractTime is a crucial factor in modelling dynamic behaviours of intelligent agents: in a real-world environment, activities have a determined temporal duration and the behaviour of agents is influenced by the actions previously taken. In this paper, we propose a language for modelling concurrent interaction between agents that also allows the specification of temporal intervals in which particular actions occur. Such a language exploits a timed version of Abstract Argumentation Frameworks to realise a shared memory used by the agents both to communicate and to reason on the acceptability of their beliefs with respect to a given time interval. An interleaving model on a single processor is used for basic computation steps (with maximal parallelism for time elapsing). Following this approach, at each moment only one of the enabled agents is executed. KeywordsArgumentation theoryConcurrencyInterleaving