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A Component-Oriented Framework for Autonomous Agents

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Formal Aspects of Component Software (FACS 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10487))

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Abstract

The design of a complex system warrants a compositional methodology, i.e., composing simple components to obtain a larger system that exhibits their collective behavior in a meaningful way. We propose an automaton-based paradigm for compositional design of such systems where an action is accompanied by one or more preferences. At run-time, these preferences provide a natural fallback mechanism for the component, while at design-time they can be used to reason about the behavior of the component in an uncertain physical world. Using structures that tell us how to compose preferences and actions, we can compose formal representations of individual components or agents to obtain a representation of the composed system. We extend Linear Temporal Logic with two unary connectives that reflect the compositional structure of the actions, and show how it can be used to diagnose undesired behavior by tracing the falsification of a specification back to one or more culpable components.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Here, we use the abbreviation SCA exclusively to refer to Soft Component Automata.

  2. 2.

    This is a rather simplistic description of energy management. We remark that a more detailed description is possible by extending SCAs with memory cells [15] and using a memory cell to store the energy level. In such a setup, a state would represent a range of energy values that determines the components disposition regarding resources.

  3. 3.

    A more detailed description of such a component could count the number of times the drone has moved without taking a snapshot first, and assign the preference of doing so again accordingly.

  4. 4.

    Recall that \(\mathsf {move}_2\) is the composition of \(\mathsf {move}\) and \(\mathsf {discharge}_2\), i.e., \(\mathsf {move}\sqsubseteq \mathsf {move}_2\).

  5. 5.

    Recall that \(7 \le _{\mathbb {W}} 5\), so 5 is a “higher” threshold in this context.

  6. 6.

    Arguably, \(A_\mathsf {e}\) as a whole may not be responsible, because modifying the preference of the \(\mathsf {move}\)-loop on \(q_N\) in \(A_\mathsf {s}\) can help to exclude the undesired behavior as well. In our framework, however, the threshold is a generic property of any SCA, and so we use it as a handle for talking about localizing undesired behaviors to component SCAs.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Vivek Nigam and the anonymous FACS-referees for their valuable feedback. This work was partially supported by ONR grant N00014–15–1–2202.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University College London, London, UK

    Tobias Kappé

  2. Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Farhad Arbab

  3. LIACS, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Farhad Arbab

  4. SRI International, Menlo Park, USA

    Carolyn Talcott

Authors
  1. Tobias Kappé
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  2. Farhad Arbab
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  3. Carolyn Talcott
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tobias Kappé .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    José Proença

  2. Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia

    Markus Lumpe

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Kappé, T., Arbab, F., Talcott, C. (2017). A Component-Oriented Framework for Autonomous Agents. In: Proença, J., Lumpe, M. (eds) Formal Aspects of Component Software. FACS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10487. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68034-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68034-7_2

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