Online situation-determined agents and their supervision

Agent supervision is a form of control/customization where a supervisor restricts the behavior of an agent to enforce certain requirements, while leaving the agent as much autonomy as possible. In this work, we investigate supervision of an agent that may acquire new knowledge about her environment during execution, for example, by sensing. Thus we consider an agent's online executions, where, as she executes the program, at each time point she must make decisions on what to do next based on what her current knowledge is. This is done in a setting based on the situation calculus and a variant of the ConGolog programming language. To reason about such agents, we first define a notion of online situation-determined agent which ensures that for any sequence of actions that the agent can perform online, the resulting agent configuration is unique. We then present our formalization of the online maximally permissive supervisor.