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Policies, Penalties, and Autonomous Agents

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Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 15245))

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Abstract

This paper introduces a framework for enabling policy-aware autonomous agents to reason about potential penalties for non-compliant behavior, and act accordingly. We employ the Authorization and Obligation Policy Language (\(\mathcal {AOPL}\)) for policy specification and Answer Set Programming (ASP) for reasoning about policies and penalties. We build upon existing work by Harders and Inclezan on simulating the behavior of policy-aware autonomous agents and test our work on two different domains. We conclude that our framework produces higher quality plans than the previous approach. Depending on the nature of the domain, optimal plans may also be computed more efficiently by our framework.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    If \(obl(\lnot e)\) is true, then the agent must not execute e.

  2. 2.

    Using a variable E is not convenient due to the “\(\lnot \)” symbol that needs to precede it.

  3. 3.

    Simultaneous agent actions are not considered here, but the framework can be easily adjusted to reason about them.

  4. 4.

    The code used in these experiments can be found at https://tinyurl.com/4bvzuwvc.

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Correspondence to Daniela Inclezan .

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Tummala, V., Inclezan, D. (2025). Policies, Penalties, and Autonomous Agents. In: Dodaro, C., Gupta, G., Martinez, M.V. (eds) Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning. LPNMR 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 15245. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74209-5_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74209-5_27

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