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Based
on the approach mentioned in Detailed
Study Design, the project is divided into the following
workpackages.
WP0:
Project Management
WP1:
A logic-based model for computees
WP2: Modelling
interactions between computees
WP3: Computational models for
(societies of) computees
WP4: Prototype demonstrator
WP5: Verifiable properties of (societies of) computees
WP6: Experimentation
A
general overview of the project workpackages, their contents
and relationships, and of their relationships with the objectives,
is as follows.
The
project consists of three phases, each corresponding to a year.
The
first phase aims at identifying formal, computational
logic-based models for representing knowledge, reasoning and
behaviour of computees in isolation (workpackage 1)
and interactive behaviour of computees within the society
they inhabit (workpackage 2). These models should allow
to abstract away from the actual internal structure, design
and realisation of the computees. More concretely, at the
level of a single computee (workpackage 1), the model should
provide ways to specify:
-
The knowledge upon which the reasoning capabilities of computee
are based;
-
The
local behaviour that a computee exhibits within a society;
-
The
global behaviour that a computee may expect from other computees
within a society.
At
the level of a society (workpackage 2), the model should
provide ways to specify:
-
Standards of interactive behaviour that the computees which
belong to or enter the society should conform to;
-
Individual
patterns of interactive behaviour, reflecting the heterogeneity
of computees;
We
envisage negotiation, possibly via constructive argumentation,
as a privileged form of interaction, in that this will allow
computees to coordinate their efforts, share their resources
and reconcile any conflicting objectives. We also envisage
hypothetical reasoning as a technique for dealing (intelligently)
with incomplete information in open environments.
The
second phase aims at providing a computational counterpart
to the formal methods proposed in the first phase. The basic
idea is to adapt and extend existing proof procedures for computational
logic formalisms, so that the complex and composite functionalities
required by our (societies of) computees can be achieved. These
functionalities include reasoning with incomplete information,
reasoning over time, in a dynamically changing environment,
assimilating new knowledge and adapting behaviour. The integration
of these functionalities within a single computational framework
is non-trivial, and multiple such integrations will be possible.
We aim at exploring such integrations in workpackage 3,
and provide an animation of the resulting societies via a prototype
demonstrator in workpackage 4.
The
third phase, in workpackage 5, aims at identifying
and catering for the verification of "interesting" properties
of:
-
individual computees, with respect to their specific knowledge
and behaviour, and
-
societies of computees, in relation to the properties of
the individual computees inhabiting them,
relying
upon the logic-based modelling of (societies of) computees as
resulting from phase 1. Then, in workpackage 6, these
theoretical results will be tested by experiments with the animation
of these societies as resulting from phase 2. The experiments
will also be used to check for any unforeseen behaviour which
can guide us to further properties to specify and verify formally,
within workpackage 5.
Workpackage
0 runs through the three years of the project and is responsible
for the administrative and technical management of the three
technical phases and the consortium.
The
workpackages outlined above will enable the SOCS project to
achieve its objectives as follows. The objectives O1
and O2 are achieved by workpackages 1 and 2, respectively. Indeed,
these workpackages are responsible for providing the formal
methods required to satisfy O1 and O2, in the form of computational
logic-based techniques. Objective O3 is achieved by workpackage
3, in that this aims at providing a computational counterpart
to the formal logic-based techniques in workpackages 1 and 2.
Objectives O4 and O5 are achieved by workpackage 5, responsible
for identifying (O4) and verifying (O5) properties of (societies
of) computees. Finally, objective O6 is achieved by the combination
of workpackages 4 and 6, that will deliver a proof that the
logic-based framework developed within SOCS can provide a practical
basis for the design of classes of systems and applications
that require aggregate behaviour of computational entities
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