Verifiable Decisions in Autonomous Concurrent Systems

International audienceBeing able to take decisions at runtime is a crucial ability for any system that is designed to act autonomously in uncertain or even unknown environments. This autonomy necessitates to formally check system properties at design time to ensure avoidance of problems or even harm caused by the system at runtime. This paper is about the formal specification of concurrent systems that are capable of reasoning about the consequences of their actions, enabling them to coordinate and decide on what to do autonomously. A non-deterministic procedural action programming language is defined to constrain system behaviour at design time. Rewriting logic is employed to construct and evaluate possible traces of programs in a decision-theoretic manner, allowing agents to perform goal-based actions autonomously at runtime as well as providing possibilities to model-check system properties at design time