Challenges in the Trustworthy Pursuit of Maintenance Commitments Under Uncertainty

Cooperating agents can make commitments for better coordination, and commitments can only be probabilistic when agents’ actions have uncertain outcomes in general. Our perspective is that a commitment should be made not to outcomes but to courses of action. An agent thus earns trust by acting in good faith with respect to its committed courses of action. With this perspective, we examine an atypical form of probabilistic commitments called maintenance commitments, where an agent commits to actions that avoid an outcome that is undesirable to another agent. Compared with the existing probabilistic commitment framework for enablement commitments, our maintenance commitment poses new semantic and algorithmic challenges. We here formulate maintenance commitments in a decision-theoretic setting, examine possible semantics for how agents should treat such commitments, and describe corresponding planning methods. We conclude by arguing why we believe our efforts demonstrate that maintenance commitments are fundamentally different from enablement commitments, and what that means for their trustworthy pursuit.