On verifying expectations and observations of intelligent agents

TL;DR

This paper introduces Public Observation Logic (POL) to reason about agent expectations and observations, analyzes its computational complexity, and demonstrates its application in verifying system properties.

Contribution

It formalizes POL, investigates its PSPACE-completeness, explores syntactic fragments, and discusses model checking implementation for verifying agent-based system characteristics.

Findings

POL model checking is PSPACE-complete.

Syntactic fragments of POL are studied for complexity.

POL effectively verifies system expectations and observations.

Abstract

Public observation logic (POL) is a variant of dynamic epistemic logic to reason about agent expectations and agent observations. Agents have certain expectations, regarding the situation at hand, that are actuated by the relevant protocols, and they eliminate possible worlds in which their expectations do not match with their observations. In this work, we investigate the computational complexity of the model checking problem for POL and prove its PSPACE-completeness. We also study various syntactic fragments of POL. We exemplify the applicability of POL model checking in verifying different characteristics and features of an interactive system with respect to the distinct expectations and (matching) observations of the system. Finally, we provide a discussion on the implementation of the model checking algorithms.