Reasoning about Time, Action and Knowledge in Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

This thesis is in the area of Multi-Agent Systems (MASs). In a MAS, multiple agents act on their own behalf or of other stakeholders, and key issues here are that they are situated, intelligent, rational and social. They are situated in the sense that they need to be able to sense their environment, intelligent in the sense that they need to model the world around them and make decisions in time and with incomplete information, rational in the sense that they make strategic deliberations when pursuing their own interest, and social in the sense that they are aware of other agents, and their level of intelligence, rationality and social skills. The General Game Playing competition tests the ability of multiple autonomous game playing agents on achieving pre-defined goals. In order to build such agents, one needs to study how agents can represent knowledge (or information) about the world, how their actions may change the world and how a MAS evolves over time due to actions performed by agents. We provide a logic-based account for the specification and verification of MASs, in terms of time, action and knowledge. The contributions are divided into two research themes.The full dissertation can be downloaded at http://ac.jiruan.net/thesis.