Modelling and monitoring social expectations in multi-agent Systems

Abstract

This paper reports on issues confronted and solutions developed while implementing the author's previously proposed hyMITL± logic for expressing social expectations as conditional rules. A high level overview of hyMITL± is presented, along with a discussion of new features and implementation issues. In particular, the importance of using human-oriented descriptions of time points is argued, along with the need to explicitly take time zones into consideration when defining rules, and a syntax for date/time expressions based on ISO standard 8601 is proposed. A new, more detailed, model for tracking the state of social expectations is also presented, based on the utility of enabling clients of a monitoring service to be notified of multiple instances of the violation or fulfilment of an expectation. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.