Skip Navigation
York U: Redefine the PossibleHOME | Current Students | Faculty & Staff | Research | International
Search »FacultiesLibrariesCampus MapsYork U OrganizationDirectorySite Index
Future Students, Alumni & Visitors
2016 Technical Reports

Online agent supervision in the situation calculus - Extended version

Bita Banihashemi, Giuseppe De Giacomo, and Yves Lespérance

Technical Report EECS-2016-02

York University

July 12 2016

Abstract

Agent supervision is a form of control/customization where a supervisor restricts the behavior of an agent to enforce certain requirements, while leaving the agent as much autonomy as possible. In this work, we investigate supervision of an agent that may acquire new knowledge about her environment during execution, for example, by sensing. Thus we consider an agent's online executions, where, as she executes the program, at each time point she must make decisions on what to do next based on what her current knowledge is. This is done in a setting based on the situation calculus and a variant of the ConGolog programming language. To reason about such agents, we first define a notion of online situation-determined agent that ensures that for any sequence of actions that the agent can perform online, the resulting agent configuration is unique. The main results of this paper are (i) a formalization of the online maximally permissive supervisor, (ii) a sound and complete technique for execution of the agent as constrained by such a supervisor, and (iii) a new type of lookahead search construct that ensures nonblockingness over such online executions.

Download paper in PDF format.



The documents distributed by this server have been provided by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a noncommercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.