View article

Goals and social commitments, respectively, capture agents’ behavior and interactions. In this technical report we propose a theoretical framework that unifies these constructs with regard to maintenance and facilitates effective cooperation between agents. Our contribution is threefold.(1) We formulate maintenance commitments as a construct in their own right, distinct from achievement commitments to complex temporal formulas.(2) We show how achievement and maintenance commitments and goals can be composed, and give pragmatic patterns of reasoning.(3) We develop an operational semantics that describes the interplay between maintenance commitments and goals. We illustrate our approach on a real-world scenario drawn from the aerospace aftermarket business service domain.