Access-as-you-need: A computational logic framework for accessing resources in artificial societies

Abstract

We investigate the application of abductive logic programming, an existing framework for knowledge representation and reasoning, for specifying the knowledge and behaviour of software agents that need to access resources in a global computing environment. The framework allows agents that need resources to join artificial societies where those resources are available. We show how to endow agents with the capability of becoming and ceasing to be members of societies, for different categories of artificial agent societies, and of requesting and being given or denied resources within societies. The strength of our formulation lies in combining the modelling and the computational properties of abductive logic programming for dealing with the issues arising in resource access within artificial agent societies.