Hierarchical decision making in multi-agent systems using answer set programming

  • Authors:

  • Davy Van Nieuwenborgh;Marina De Vos;Stijn Heymans;Dirk Vermeir

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium;Dept. of Computer Science, University of Bath, Bath, UK;Digital Enterprise Research Institute, University of Innsbruck, Austria;Dept. of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • CLIMA VII'06 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Computational logic in multi-agent systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We present a multi-agent formalism based on extended answer set programming. The system consists of independent agents connected via a communication channel, where knowledge and beliefs of each agent are represented by a logic program. When presented with an input set of literals from its predecessor, an agent computes its output as an extended answer set of its program enriched with the input, carefully eliminating contradictions that might occur. It turns out that while individual agents are rather simple, the interaction strategy makes the system quite expressive: essentially a hierarchy of a fixed number of agents n captures the complexity class ΣnP, i.e. the n-th level of the polynomial hierarchy. Furthermore, unbounded hierarchies capture the polynomial hierarchy PH. This makes the formalism suitable for modelling complex applications of MAS, for example cooperative diagnosis. Furthermore, such systems can be realized by implementing an appropriate control strategy on top of existing solvers such as DLV and SMODELS.