Evaluating the Assignment of Behavioral Goals to Coalitions of Agents

We present a formal framework for solving what we call the “assignment problem”: given a set of behavioral goals for a system and a set of agents described by their capabilities to make the system evolve, the problem is to find a “good” assignment of goals to (coalitions of) agents. To do so, we define \({\textsc {Kore}}\), a core modelling framework as well as its semantics in terms of a strategy logic called \(\text {USL}\). In \({\textsc {Kore}}\), agents are defined by their capabilities, which are pre- and post-conditions on the system variables, and goals are defined in terms of temporal logic formulas. Then, an assignment associates each goal with the coalition of agents that is responsible for its satisfaction. Our problem consists in defining and checking the correctness of this assignment. We define different criteria for modelling and formalizing this notion of correctness. They reduce to the satisfaction of \(\text {USL}\) formulas in a structure derived from the capabilities of agents. Thus, we end up with a procedure for deciding the correctness of the assignment. We illustrate our approach using a toy example featuring exchanges of resources between a provider and two clients.