Evelina Lamma

Verifiable agent interaction in abductive logic programming: The SCIFF framework

SCIFF is a framework thought to specify and verify interaction in open agent societies. The SCIFF language is equipped with a semantics based on abductive logic programming; SCIFFs operational component is a new abductive logic programming proof procedure, also named SCIFF, for reasoning with expectations in dynamic environments. In this article we present the declarative and operational semantics of the SCIFF language, and the termination, soundness, and completeness results of the SCIFF proof procedure, and we demonstrate SCIFFs possible application in the multiagent domain.

Modularity in Logic Programming

Abstract The research on modular logic programming has evolved along two different directions during the past decade. Various papers have focused primarily on the problems of programming-in-the-large. They have proposed module systems equipped with compositional operators for building programs as combinations of separate and independent components. Other proposals have instead concentrated on the problem of programming-in-the-small in an attempt to enrich logic programming with abstraction and scoping mechanisms available in other programming paradigms. The issues that arise in the two approaches are substantially different. The compositional operators of the former allow one to structure programs without any need to extend the theory of Horn clauses. The scoping and abstraction mechanisms of the latter are modeled in terms of the logical connectives of extended logic languages. In this paper we provide a uniform reconstruction of the above approaches and we show, wherever this is possible, how the object-level logical connectives of the latter can be mapped onto the compositional operators of the former.

COMPLIANCE VERIFICATION OF AGENT INTERACTION: A LOGIC-BASED SOFTWARE TOOL

In open societies of agents, where agents are autonomous and heterogeneous, it is not realistic to assume that agents will always act so as to comply with interaction protocols. Thus, the need arises for a formalism to specify constraints on agent interaction, and for a tool able to observe and check for agent compliance with interaction protocols. In this paper we present a JAVA-PROLOG software component built on logic programming technology, which can be used to verify compliance of agent interaction to protocols, and that has been integrated with the PROSOCS platform.

Applying inductive logic programming to process mining

The management of business processes has recently received a lot of attention. One of the most interesting problems is the description of a process model in a language that allows the checking of the compliance of a process execution (or trace) to the model. In this paper we propose a language for the representation of process models that is inspired to the SCIFF language and is an extension of clausal logic. A process model is represented in the language as a set of integrity constraints that allow conjunctive formulas as disjuncts in the head. We present an approach for inducing these models from data: we define a subsumption relation for the integrity constraints, we define a refinement operator and we adapt the algorithm ICL to the problem of learning such formulas. The system has been applied to the problem of inducing the model of a sealed bid auction and of the NetBill protocol. The data used for learning and testing were randomly generated from correct models of the processes.

Inducing declarative logic-based models from labeled traces

In this work we propose an approach for the automatic discoveryof logic-based models starting from a set of process executiontraces. The approach is based on a modified Inductive Logic Programmingalgorithm, capable of learning a set of declarative rules. The advantage of using a declarative description is twofold. First, theprocess is represented in an intuitive and easily readable way; second,a family of proof procedures associated to the chosen language can beused to support the monitoring and management of processes (conformancetesting, properties verification and interoperability checking, inparticular). The approach consists in first learning integrity constraints expressedas logical formulas and then translating them into a declarative graphicallanguage named DecSerFlow. We demonstrate the viability of the approach by applying it to a realdataset from a health case process and to an artificial dataset from ane-commerce protocol.

Exploiting Inductive Logic Programming Techniques for Declarative Process Mining

In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the adoption of declarative paradigms for modeling and verifying process models. These paradigms provide an abstract and human understandable way of specifying constraints that must hold among activities executions rather than focusing on a specific procedural solution. Mining such declarative descriptions is still an open challenge. In this paper, we present a logic-based approach for tackling this problem. It relies on Inductive Logic Programming techniques and, in particular, on a modified version of the Inductive Constraint Logic algorithm. We investigate how, by properly tuning the learning algorithm, the approach can be adopted to mine models expressed in the ConDec notation, a graphical language for the declarative specification of business processes. Then, we sketch how such a mining framework has been concretely implemented as a ProM plug-in called DecMiner. We finally discuss the effectiveness of the approach by means of an example which shows the ability of the language to model concurrent activities and of DecMiner to learn such a model.

Cooperation and Competition in ALIAS: A Logic Framework for Agents that Negotiate

This paper presents ALIAS, an agent architecture based on intelligent logic agents, where the main form of agent reasoning is abduction. The system is particularly suited for solving problems where knowledge is incomplete, where agents may need to make reasonable hypotheses about the problem domain and other agents, and where the raised hypotheses have to be consistent for the overall set of agents. ALIAS agents are pro-active, exhibiting a goal-directed behavior, and autonomous, since each one can solve problems using its own private knowledge base. ALIAS agents are also social, because they are able to interact with other agents, in order to cooperatively solve problems. The coordination mechanisms are modeled by means of LAILA, a logic-based language which allows to express intra-agent reasoning and inter-agent coordination. As an application, we show how LAILA can be used to implement inter-agent dialogues, e.g., for negotiation. In particular, LAILA is well-suited to coordinate the process of negotiation aimed at exchanging resources between agents, thus allowing them to execute the plans to achieve their goals.

Integrating constraint logic programming and operations research techniques for the crew rostering problem

In this paper, we investigate the possibility of integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR) techniques for solving the Crew Rostering Problem (CRP). CRP calls for the optimal sequencing of a given set of duties into rosters satisfying a set of constraints. The optimality criterion requires the minimization of the number of crews needed to cover the duties. This kind of problem has been traditionally solved by OR techniques. In recent years, a new programming paradigm based on Logic Programming, named Constraint Logic Programming (CLP), has been successfully used for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. CLP maintains all the advantages of logic programming such as declarativeness, non‐determinism and an incremental style of programming, while overcoming its limitations, mainly due to the inefficiency in exploring the search space. CLP achieves good results on hard combinatorial optimization problems which, however, are not comparable with those achieved by OR approaches. Therefore, we integrate both techniques in order to design an effective heuristic algorithm for CRP which fully exploits the advantages of the two methodologies: on the one hand, we maintain the declarativeness of CLP, its ease of representing knowledge and its rapid prototyping; on the other hand, we inherit from OR some efficient procedures based on a mathematical approach to the problem. Finally, we compare the results we achieved by means of the integration with those obtained by a pure OR approach, showing that AI and OR techniques for hard combinatorial optimization problems can be effectively integrated.

Expressing and Verifying Business Contracts with Abductive Logic Programming

SCIFF is a declarative language, based on abductive logic programming, that accommodates forward rules, predicate definitions, and constraints over finite domain variables. Its abductive declarative semantics can be related to that of deontic operators; its operational specification is the sound and complete SCIFF proof procedure, defined as a set of transition rules implemented and integrated into a reasoning and verification tool. A variation of the SCIFF proof procedure (g-SCIFF) can be used for static verification of contract properties. The use of SCIFF for business contract specification and verification is demonstrated in a concrete scenario. Encoding of SCIFF contract rules in RuleML accommodates integration of SCIFF with architectures for business contracts.

An abductive framework for a-priori verification of web services

Although stemming from very different research areas, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Service Oriented Computing (SOC) share common topics, problems and settings. One of the common problems is the need to formally verify the conformance of individuals (Agents or Web Services) to common rules and specifications (resp. Protocols/Choreographies), in order to provide a coherent behaviour and to reach the goals of the user.In previous publications, we developed a framework, SCIFF, for the automatic verification of compliance of agents to protocols. The framework includes a language based on abductive logic programming and on constraint logic programming for formally defining the social rules; suitable proof-procedures to check on-the-fly and a-priori the compliance of agents to protocols have been defined.Building on our experience in the MAS area, in this paper we make a first step towards the formal verification of web services conformance to choreographies. We adapt the SCIFF\ framework for the new settings, and propose a heir of SCIFF, the framework AlLoWS (Abductive Logic Web-service Specification).. AlLoWS comes with a language for defining formally a choreography and a web service specification. As its ancestor, AlLoWS has a declarative and an operational semantics. We show examples of how AlLoWS deals correctly with interaction patterns previously identified. Moreover, thanks to its constraint-based semantics, AlLoWS deals seamlessly with other cases involving constraints and deadlines