dc.description.abstract | Multi-agent Systems (MAS) provide an increasingly relevant field of research due to
their many applications to modelling real world situations where the behaviour of many
individual, self-motivated, agents must be reasoned about and controlled. The problem
of agent social reasoning is central to MAS, where an agent reasons about its actions
and interactions with other agents. This is the most important component of MAS, as
it is the interactions, cooperation and competition between agents that make MAS a
powerful approach suited for tackling many complex problems. Existing work focuses
either on specific types of social reasoning or general purpose agent practical reasoning
- reasoning directed toward actions. This thesis argues that social reasoning should
be considered separately from practical reasoning. There are many possible benefits
to this separation compared to existing approaches. Principally, it can allow general
algorithms for agent implementation, analysis and bounded reasoning. This viewpoint
is motivated by the desire to implement social reasoning agents and allow for a more
general theory of social reasoning in agents. This thesis presents the novel Expectation-
Strategy-Behaviour (ESB) framework for social reasoning, which provides a generic
way to specify and execute agent reasoning approaches. ESB is a powerful tool, allowing
an agent designer to write expressive social reasoning specifications and have
a computational model generated automatically. Through a formalism and description
of an implemented reasoner based on this theory it is shown that it is possible
and beneficial to implement a social reasoning engine as a complementary component
to practical reasoning. By using ESB to specify, and then implement, existing social
reasoning schemes for joint commitment and normative reasoning, the framework is
shown to be a suitable general reasoner. Examples are provided of how reasoning can
be bounded in an ESB agent and the mechanism to allow analysis of agent designs is
discussed. Finally, there is discussion on the merits of the ESB solution and possible
future work. | en |