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Reliable Agent Computation: An Algebraic Approach

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Intelligent Agents: Specification, Modeling, and Applications (PRIMA 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2132))

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Abstract

Agent programming languages based on a sense-compute-act cycle and stored plan execution, such as PRS and dMARS, lack any formal semantics; this and the actual computational models which they employ can make it difficult or impossible to reason about agent behaviour. In this paper we present the Ψ calculus, a novel algebraic language which generalizes and extends these languages and remedies several of their shortcomings. Ψ has a complete operational semantics covering all aspects of agent computation from intention step execution to the top-level control cycle, specified uniformly in process algebraic style, and has certain desirable safety, guarantee and compositionality properties which facilitate reasoning about agent program behaviour.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Intelligent Agent Laboratory, Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne, 3010, Australia

    David Kinny

Authors
  1. David Kinny
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Management, Fu-Jen University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Soe -Tsyr Yuan

  2. NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan

    Makoto Yokoo

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kinny, D. (2001). Reliable Agent Computation: An Algebraic Approach. In: Yuan, S.T., Yokoo, M. (eds) Intelligent Agents: Specification, Modeling, and Applications. PRIMA 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2132. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44637-0_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44637-0_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42434-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44637-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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