Formal Consistency Verification of Deliberative Agents with Respect to Communication Protocols

The aim of this paper is to show a method that is able to detect inconsistencies in the reasoning carried out by a deliberative agent. The agent is supposed to be provided with a hybrid Knowledge Base expressed in a language called CCR-2, based on production rules and hierarchies of frames, which permits the representation of non-monotonic reasoning, uncertain reasoning and arithmetic constraints in the rules. The method can give a specification of the scenarios in which the agent would deduce an inconsistency. We define a scenario to be a description of the initial agent’s state (in the agent life cycle), a deductive tree of rule firings, and a partially ordered set of messages and/or stimuli that the agent must receive from other agents and/or the environment. Moreover, the method will make sure that the scenarios will be vaIid w.r.t. the communication protocols in which the agent is involved.