A Formal Framework for Agency and Autonomy

With the recent rapid growth of interest in MultiAgent Systems, both in artificial intelligence and software engineering, has come an associated difficulty concerning basic terms and concepts. In particular, the terms agency and autonomy are used with increasing frequency to denote different notions with different connotations. In this paper we lay the foundations for a principled theory of agency and autonomy, and specify the relationship between them. Using the Z specification language, we describe a three-tiered hierarchy comprising objects, agents and autonomous agents where agents are viewed as objects with goals, and autonomous agents are agents with motivations. Introduction Although there has been substantial progress in artificial intelligence for many years, research tended to focus on solving problems without regard to any real external environment or to the notion of a reasoning agent. In other words, the problems and their solutions, while significant, were limited in t..