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On the Trustworthy Fulfillment of Commitments

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Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10002))

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Abstract

An agent that adopts a commitment to another agent should act so as to bring about a state of the world meeting the specifications of the commitment. Thus, by faithfully pursuing a commitment, an agent can be trusted to make sequential decisions that it believes can cause an intended state to arise. In general, though, an agent’s actions will have uncertain outcomes, and thus reaching an intended state cannot be guaranteed. For such sequential decision settings with uncertainty, therefore, commitments can only be probabilistic. We propose a semantics for the trustworthy fulfillment of a probabilistic commitment that hinges on whether the agent followed a policy that would be expected to achieve an intended state with sufficient likelihood, rather than on whether the intended state was actually reached. We have developed and evaluated algorithms that provably operationalize this semantics, with different tradeoffs between responsiveness and computational overhead. We also discuss opportunities and challenges in extending our proposed semantics to richer forms of uncertainty, and to other agent architectures besides the decision-theoretic agents that have been our initial focus of study. Finally, we consider the implications of our semantics on how trust might be established and confirmed in open agent systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The material presented in Sects. 2 and 3 has appeared in similar form in an unpublished symposium paper [7], and summaries of the algorithms presented in Sect. 4 appeared in an extended abstract at AAMAS12 [20].

  2. 2.

    Because the model is assumed accurate, the agent can be assumed to only formulate policies (and thus commitments) that it is capable of executing. Permitting inaccurate models (where an agent might make a commitment it is inherently incapable of fulfilling) is outside the scope of the focus of this paper on trustworthy fulfillment of commitments.

  3. 3.

    Recall that a policy is defined over all (belief) states, and so covers every possible contingency that could arise during execution. We refer to a particular sequence of states and (policy-dictated) actions that might be experienced as a trajectory. Note that a policy thus differs from a plan, which is typically defined in terms of a specific (nominal) trajectory. Hence, a plan can fail (stimulating plan repair or replanning) when unintended action outcomes or external events cause a deviation from the plan’s nominal trajectory. In contrast, a policy never “fails” because it specifies actions for every state (and thus for every possible trajectory).

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Acknowledgments

Inn-Tung (Anna) Chen, Stefan Witwicki, Alexander Gutierrez, and Qi Zhang contributed to various aspects of the ideas and algorithms described in this paper. We also benefited from detailed discussions about commitments with Munindar Singh and Scott Gerard, and from the questions and suggestions of the anonymous reviewers. This work was supported in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under grant FA9550-15-1-0039.

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  1. Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Edmund H. Durfee & Satinder Singh

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  1. Edmund H. Durfee
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  2. Satinder Singh
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Correspondence to Edmund H. Durfee .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Campus de la UAB, IIIA-CSIC , Bellaterra, Spain

    Nardine Osman

  2. Campus de la UAB, IIIA-CSIC , Bellaterra, Spain

    Carles Sierra

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Durfee, E.H., Singh, S. (2016). On the Trustworthy Fulfillment of Commitments. In: Osman, N., Sierra, C. (eds) Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. AAMAS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10002. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46882-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46882-2_1

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