C LAUSAL R ESOLUTION IN THE F RAMEWORK OF S OCIAL
AGENCY
I.S VIGKOS AND A.B OLOTOV
H ARROW S CHOOL OF C OMPUTER S CIENCE , U NIVERSITY OF W ESTMINSTER
L ONDON , H ARROW HA1 3TP, U NITED K INGDOM
e-mail: svigkoi, bolotoa @westminster.ac.uk
A BSTRACT
Agents that inhabit the same environment have the ability to accomplish their goals by coordinating
their activities in a collaborative or a competitive fashion. However, as they are autonomous, possible
interactions that emerge over time may lead to anarchy and chaos [2, 6, 7]. For instance, actions that are
performed by a member of the agency, may not fit well with actions performed by another member. It has
been pointed out by many researchers that in order to control interaction in multi-agent systems building
social-oriented agents is essential [1, 2].
Although social reasoning is an active research area in the multi-agent systems field, there is an obvious
lack of the logical representation of agents from the social point of view and the provision of proof and
verification methods.
Our specification of social agency is based upon the fusion of the branching-time logic (CTL) [4], with
the deontic logic counterpart [5, 8] resulting in the so-called logic CTDL. Namely, the deontic logic in
which we are interested has characteristics that are similar to those of KD4. This allows us to consider
the development of formal analysis of systems of social agency from a dual point of view: the temporal
dimension reflects dynamic aspects of these systems while the social captures normative concepts. As a
verification method for specifications obtained in this logic we propose a clausal resolution proof technique.
The core components of the method, namely the normal form and the set of resolution rules are introduced.
The development of these concepts was inspired by the application of the clausal resolution technique to
the logic of rational agency [3]. The soundness of the translation of the given CTDL formulae into the
normal form and of the resolution technique are shown while proof of completeness is our future work.
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