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Timed soft concurrent constraint programs: An interleaved and a parallel approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2014

STEFANO BISTARELLI ,
MAURIZIO GABBRIELLI ,
MARIA CHIARA MEO  and
FRANCESCO SANTINI
STEFANO BISTARELLI
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università di Perugia Via Vanvitelli 1, 06123 Perugia, Italy (e-mail: vista@dmi.unipg.it)
MAURIZIO GABBRIELLI
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione, Università di Bologna Via Zamboni 33, 40126 Bologna, Italy (e-mail: gabbri@cs.unibo.it)
MARIA CHIARA MEO
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Economia, Università “G. D'Annunzio” Viale Pindaro 42, 65127 Pescara, Italy (e-mail: cmeo@unich.it)
FRANCESCO SANTINI
Affiliation:
Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) Science Park 123, 1098XG Amsterdam, The Netherlands (e-mail: F.Santini@cwi.nl)
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Abstract

We propose a timed and soft extension of Concurrent Constraint Programming. The time extension is based on the hypothesis of bounded asynchrony: The computation takes a bounded period of time and is measured by a discrete global clock. Action prefixing is then considered as the syntactic marker that distinguishes a time instant from the next one. Supported by soft constraints instead of crisp ones, tell and ask agents are now equipped with a preference (or consistency) threshold, which is used to determine their success or suspension. In this paper, we provide a language to describe the agents' behavior, together with its operational and denotational semantics, for which we also prove the compositionality and correctness properties. After presenting a semantics using maximal parallelism of actions, we also describe a version for their interleaving on a single processor (with maximal parallelism for time elapsing). Coordinating agents that need to take decisions on both preference values and time events may benefit from this language.

Keywords

Soft Concurrent Constraint ProgrammingTimed Concurrent Constraint Programminginterleavingparallelism

Information

Type
Regular Papers
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 15 , Issue 6 , November 2015 , pp. 743 - 782
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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