Act for Your Duties but Maintain Your Rights

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework for synthesizing strategies for agents that balance fulfilling their duties with maintaining their rights, using LTLf specifications, allowing dynamic modifications during execution.

Contribution

It extends LTLf synthesis to incorporate rights, enabling agents to adapt strategies on-the-fly to fulfill both duties and rights without significant complexity increase.

Findings

Handling rights does not substantially increase synthesis complexity.

Strategies can be dynamically modified to achieve both duties and rights.

The approach extends to multiple, evolving duties and rights during execution.

Abstract

Most of the synthesis literature has focused on studying how to synthesize a strategy to fulfill a task. This task is a duty for the agent. In this paper, we argue that intelligent agents should also be equipped with rights, that is, tasks that the agent itself can choose to fulfill (e.g., the right of recharging the battery). The agent should be able to maintain these rights while acting for its duties. We study this issue in the context of LTLf synthesis: we give duties and rights in terms of LTLf specifications, and synthesize a suitable strategy to achieve the duties that can be modified on-the-fly to achieve also the rights, if the agent chooses to do so. We show that handling rights does not make synthesis substantially more difficult, although it requires a more sophisticated solution concept than standard LTLf synthesis. We also extend our results to the case in which further duties and rights are given to the agent while already executing.