Theory of goal-oriented communication in infinite executions

Abstract

Our model of goals in finite executions, as first introduced in Chapter 2, captured many natural goals for communication, as illustrated in Chapter 3. This framework only captured goals that could be modeled as the user trying to reach a certain state of the environment by communicating with the server, though; another kind of goal that is not captured by this framework is a goal in which the user tries to maintain effective communication with the server over time. As such goals arise naturally in many contexts, we are motivated to introduce a new framework that does capture such goals—in fact, we’ll even see at the end of this chapter, in Section 6.4, that this new framework can even capture the finite-execution framework as a special case, and so the new framework will subsume the earlier framework, at the cost of some (moderate) additional technical complexity.