40535872
Compositional Verification of Multi-Agent Systems in Temporal Multi-Epistemic Logic
Compositional verification aims at managing the complexity of theverification process by exploiting compositionality of the systemarchitecture. In this paper we explore the use of a temporal epistemiclogic to formalize the process of verification of compositionalmulti-agent systems. The specification of a system, its properties andtheir proofs are of a compositional nature, and are formalized within acompositional temporal logic: Temporal Multi-Epistemic Logic. It isshown that compositional proofs are valid under certain conditions.Moreover, the possibility of incorporating default persistence ofinformation in a system, is explored. A completion operation on aspecific type of temporal theories, temporal completion, is introducedto be able to use classical proof techniques in verification withrespect to non-classical semantics covering default persistence.
17644062
Specification of nonmonotonic reasoning
ABSTRACT Two levels of description of nonmonotonic reasoning are distinguished. For these levels semantical formalizations are given. The first level is defined semantically by the notion of belief state frame, the second level by the notion of reasoning frame. We introduce two specification languages to describe nonmonotonic reasoning at each of the levels: (1) a specification language for level 1, with formal semantics based on belief state frames, (2) a fragment of infinitary temporal logic as a general specification language for level 2, with formal semantics based on reasoning frames. In our framework every level 2 description can be abstracted to level 1, and for every level 1 description there are level 2 descriptions which are a specialization of it.
1862248
Monotonicity and Persistence in Preferential Logics
An important characteristic of many logics for Artificial Intelligence is their nonmonotonicity. This means that adding a formula to the premises can invalidate some of the consequences. There may, however, exist formulae that can always be safely added to the premises without destroying any of the consequences: we say they respect monotonicity. Also, there may be formulae that, when they are a consequence, can not be invalidated when adding any formula to the premises: we call them conservative. We study these two classes of formulae for preferential logics, and show that they are closely linked to the formulae whose truth-value is preserved along the (preferential) ordering. We will consider some preferential logics for illustration, and prove syntactic characterization results for them. The results in this paper may improve the efficiency of theorem provers for preferential logics.
9865419
A compositional reasoning system for executing nonmonotonic theories of reasoning
In this paper the framework DESIRE for the design of compositional reasoning systems and multi-agent systems was applied to build a generic nonmonotonic reasoning system. The outcome is a general reasoning system that can be used to model different nonmonotonic reasoning formalisms and that can be executed by a generic execution mechanism. The main advantages of using DESIRE (for example, compared to a direct implementation in a programming language such as PROLOG) are that the design is generic and has a transparent compositional structure, and the explicit declarative specification of both the static and dynamic aspects of the nonmonotonic reasoning processes, including their control. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
35737768
A Compositional Reasoning System for Executing Nonmonotonic Theories of Reasoning
In this paper a system was developed using the compositional modelling environment DESIRE (framework for DEsign and Specification of Interacting REasoning components). This environment for the development of compositional reasoning systems and multi-agent systems has been succesfully used to design various types of reasoning systems and multi-agent systems and applications in particular domains. The DESIRE sofware environment offers a graphical editor, an implementation generator and an execution environment to execute specifications automatically.
34555418
Nonmonotonic Reasoning with Multiple Belief Sets
In the present paper we introduce nonmonotonic belief set operators and selection operators to formalize and to analyze multiple belief sets in an abstract setting. We define and investigate formal properties of belief set operators as absorption, congruence, supradeductivity and weak belief monotony. Furthermore, it is shown that for each belief set operator satisfying strong belief cumulativity there exists a largest monotonic logic underlying it, thus generalizing a result for nonmonotonic inference operations. Finally, we study abstract properties of selective inference operations connected to belief set operators and which are used to choose one of the possible views.
11003400
Passes and Paths of Attributive Grammars
An attribute grammar is pure (left-to-right) multi-pass if a bounded number of left-to-right passes over the derivation tree suffice to compute all its attributes. There is no requirement, as for the usual multi-pass attribute grammars, that all occurrences of the same attribute are computed in the same pass. It is shown that the problem of determining whether an arbitrary attribute grammar is pure multipass, is of inherently exponential time complexity. For fixed k > 0, it can be decided in polynomial time whether an attribute grammar is pure k-pass. The proofs are based on a characterization of pure multi-pass attribute grammars in terms of paths through their dependency graphs. A general result on dependency paths of attribute grammars relates them to (finite-copying) top-down tree transducers. The formal power of k-pass attribute grammars increases with increasing k. Formally, multi-pass attribute grammars are less powerful than arbitrary attribute grammars.
15984778
XML transformation by tree-walking transducers with invisible pebbles
The pebble tree automaton and the pebble tree transducer are enhanced by additionally allowing an unbounded number of "invisible" pebbles (as opposed to the usual ("visible" ones). The resulting pebble tree automata recognize the regular tree languages (i.e., can validate all generalized DTD's) and hence can find all matches of MSO definable n-ary patterns. Moreover, when viewed as a navigational device, they lead to an XPath-like formalism that has a path expression for every MSO definable binary pattern. The resulting pebbletree transducers can apply arbitrary MSO definable tests to (the observable part of) their configurations, they (still) have a decidable typechecking problem, and they can model the recursion mechanism of XSLT. The time complexity ofthe typechecking problem for conjunctive queries that use MSO definable binary patterns can often be reduced through the use of invisible pebbles.
14239266
The Equivalence Problem for Deterministic MSO Tree Transducers Is Decidable
It is decidable for deterministic MSO definable graph-to-string or graph-to-tree transducers whether they are equivalent on a context-free set of graphs.
5981521
Nested Pebbles and Transitive Closure
First-order logic with k-ary deterministic transitive closure has the same power as two-way k-head deterministic automata that use a finite set of nested pebbles. This result is valid for strings, ranked trees, and in general for families of graphs having a fixed automaton that can be used to traverse the nodes of each of the graphs in the family. Other examples of such families are grids, toruses, and rectangular mazes.
17739753
Finite Languages for the Representation of Finite Graphs
We introduce a new way of specifying graphs: through languages, i.e., sets of strings. The strings of a given (finite, prefix-free) language represent the vertices of the graph; whether or not there is an edge between the vertices represented by two strings is determined by the pair of symbols at the first position in these strings where they differ. With this new, “positional” or lexicographic, method, classical and well-understood ways of specifying languages can now be used to specify graphs, in a compact way; thus, (small) finite automata can be used to specify (large) graphs. Since (prefix-free) languages can be viewed as trees, our method generalizes the hierarchical specification of particular types of graphs such as cographs and VSP graphs. Our main results demonstrate an intrinsic relationship between the fundamental operations of language concatenation and graph substitution.