Representing and monitoring social commitments using the event calculus

• DOI: 10.1007/s10458-012-9202-0
• Publication Date: 2012-06-21T13:58:28Z
• Authors: Federico Chesani; Paola Mello; Marco Montali; Paolo Torroni
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; SOCIAL COMMITMENTS; ON-LINE MONITORING; MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS; EVENT CALCULUS; 02 engineering and technology

Multiagent social commitments provide a principled basis for agent interactions, and serve as a natural tool to resolve design ambiguities. Indeed, they have been the subject of considerable research for more than a decade. However, the take-up of the social commitments paradigm is yet to come. To explain this negative result, we pinpoint a number of shortcomings, which this article aims to address. We extend current commitment modelling languages, thus leveraging expressive possibilities that were precluded by previous formalizations. We propose a novel axiomatization of commitment operations in a first order Event Calculus framework, that accommodates reasoning with data and metric time. Finally, we illustrate how publicly available $${\mathcal{REC}}$$ implementations can be exploited for commitment monitoring purposes.