Commitment-Based Multiagent Decision Making

Abstract

In a cooperative system, multiple dynamic agents work together and share resources to achieve common goals, while simultaneously pursuing their individual goals. Interactions among the agents in such a cooperative system are critical to its successful behavior, and we believe that commitments are the proper abstraction to characterize the interactions. Commitments then become the basis for monitoring and controlling the system and tracking the progress towards its goals.

Commitments are binary relationships that bind two agents: a “debtor agent” that promises to provide a particular service for a “creditor agent”. Their role is to represent agreements between the agents and prevent potential conflicts while the agents collaborate to achieve the system’s common goals, which are imposed from outside. But the willingness to participate in achieving the goals comes from within the agent and that is why the beliefs, desires, and intentions of the agents are crucial in formalizing commitments. In this paper, we have formalized commitments in terms of the agents’ internal states of mind—their beliefs, desires, and intentions. This formalization addresses what it means for a participating agent to promise or to satisfy a commitment. The formalization uses a branching-time computational tree logic framework with commitment definitions and operations to define a commitment-centric cooperative multiagent environment.