Stabilization of cooperative information agents in unpredictable environment: a logic programming approach

Abstract

An information agent is viewed as a deductive database consisting of three parts:

1. an observation database containing the facts the agent has observed or sensed from its surrounding environment;

2. an input database containing the information the agent has obtained from other agents;

3. an intensional database which is a set of rules for computing derived information from the information stored in the observation and input databases.

Stabilization of a system of information agents represents a capability of the agents to eventually get correct information about their surrounding despite unpredictable environment changes and the incapability of many agents to sense such changes causing them to have temporary incorrect information. We argue that the stabilization of a system of cooperative information agents could be understood as the convergence of the behavior of the whole system toward the behavior of a “superagent”, who has the sensing and computing capabilities of all agents combined. We show that unfortunately, stabilization is not guaranteed in general, even if the agents are fully cooperative and do not hide any information from each other. We give sufficient conditions for stabilization. We discuss the consequences of our results.