Temporal linear logic as a basis for flexible agent interactions

Interactions between agents in an open system such as the Internet require a significant degree of flexibility. A crucial aspect of the development of such methods is the notion of commitments, which provides a mechanism for coordinating interactive behaviors among agents. In this paper, we investigate an approach to model commitments with tight integration with protocol actions. This means that there is no need to have an explicit mapping from protocols actions to operations on commitments and an external mechanism to process and enforce commitments. We show how agents can reason about commitments and protocol actions to achieve the end results of protocols using a reasoning system based on temporal linear logic, which incorporates both temporal and resource-sensitive reasoning. We also discuss the application of this framework to scenarios such as online commerce.