A commitment is a construct that binds a debtor with respect to a creditor to the performance of an action or to the fact that a state of affair holds. Commitment are used in this chapter to express the semantics of a library of communicative acts, to represent active norms, and to monitor the fulfillment or violation of obligations and prohibitions of the various agents at run-time.
Published in Chapter:
Specifying Artificial Institutions in the Event Calculus
Nicoletta Fornara (Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland) and Marco Colombetti (Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland and Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 32
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-256-5.ch014
Abstract
The specification of open interaction systems is widely recognized to be a crucial issue, which involves the problem of finding a standard way of specifying: a communication language for the interacting agents, the entities that constitute the context of the interaction, and rules that regulate interactions. An approach to solve these problems consists in modelling open interaction systems as a set of artificial institutions. In this chapter we address this issue by formally defining, in the Event Calculus, a repertoire of abstract concepts (like commitment, institutional power, role, and norm) that can be used to specify every artificial institution. We then show how, starting from the formal definition of these concepts and of application-dependent concepts, it is possible to obtain a formal specification of a system. By using a suitable tool, it is then possible to simulate and monitor the system’s evolution through automatic deduction.