An action language for multi-agent domains

The goal of this paper is to investigate an action language, called mA*, for representing and reasoning about actions and change in multi-agent domains. The language, as designed, can also serve as a specification language for epistemic planning, thereby addressing an important issue in the development of multi-agent epistemic planning systems. The mA* action language is a generalization of the single-agent action languages, extensively studied in the literature, to the case of multi-agent domains. The language allows the representation of different types of actions that an agent can perform in a domain where many other agents might be present-such as world-altering actions, sensing actions, and communication actions. The action language also allows the specification of agents' dynamic awareness of action occurrences-which has implications on what agents' know about the world and other agents' knowledge about the world. These features are embedded in a language that is simple, yet powerful enough to address a large variety of knowledge manipulation scenarios in multi-agent domains. The semantics of mA* relies on the notion of state, which is described by a pointed Kripke model and is used to encode the agents' knowledge(1) and the real state of the world. The semantics is defined by a transition function that maps pairs of actions and states into sets of states. The paper presents a number of properties of the action theories and relates mA* to other relevant formalisms in the area of reasoning about actions in multi-agent domains. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.