World Automata: a compositional approach to model implicit communication in hierarchical Hybrid Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces World Automata, an extension of Hybrid I/O Automata, to model agent systems and their implicit environmental communication, maintaining compositional properties and enabling hierarchical modeling of agents and environments.

Contribution

It presents World Automata, a novel formalism that incorporates world variables and inplacement operator for hierarchical and implicit communication modeling.

Findings

World Automata effectively model agent-environment interactions.

The formalism preserves key compositional properties of HIOAs.

Hierarchical modeling of agents and environments is achieved.

Abstract

We propose an extension of Hybrid I/O Automata (HIOAs) to model agent systems and their implicit communication through perturbation of the environment, like localization of objects or radio signals diffusion and detection. The new object, called World Automaton (WA), is built in such a way to preserve as much as possible of the compositional properties of HIOAs and its underlying theory. From the formal point of view we enrich classical HIOAs with a set of world variables whose values are functions both of time and space. World variables are treated similarly to local variables of HIOAs, except in parallel composition, where the perturbations produced by world variables are summed. In such way, we obtain a structure able to model both agents and environments, thus inducing a hierarchy in the model and leading to the introduction of a new operator. Indeed this operator, called inplacement, is needed to represent the possibility of an object (WA) of living inside another object/environment (WA).