Limit Behavior of Agents

Abstract

Chapter 3 introduced the concepts of strong and weak bisimulation limits and trace limits of agents. They are dynamic counterparts on the one hand, of strong and weak bisimilarities and on the other, trace equivalence. Strong and weak bisimulation limits and trace limits determine topologies on agents, and these topologies are called strong and weak bisimulation topologies and trace topology, respectively. This chapter also investigates dynamic features of agents. We know that bisimulation and trace topologies are completely characterized by behaviors of agents, so they are extensional topological structures on agents. Nevertheless, in this chapter a topology on actions is presumed as the starting point of our approach. This topology is determined by the real problem that we are considering, and it expresses a certain relationship (e.g., distance, similarity, closeness, and proximity) among actions. So, according to the classification made in Chapter 1, the approach adopted in this chapter is intensional. We are interested in the limit behaviors of agents induced by the presumed topology on actions. Because the presumed topology is assumed in advance, it is independent of any concrete agent. To describe the topological properties of some agents, we may need to modify this topoloy, in accordance with the structure of these agents. Some techniques of modifying topologies on actions are proposed in Section 4.1. In Section 4.2, the notion of agent schema is introduced.