Formalizing Collaborative Decision‐making and Practical Reasoning in Multi‐agent Systems

In this paper, we present an abstract formal model of decision‐making in a social setting that covers all aspects of the process, from recognition of a potential for cooperation through to joint decision. In a multi‐agent environment, where self‐motivated autonomous agents try to pursue their own goals, a joint decision cannot be taken for granted. In order to decide effectively, agents need the ability to (a) represent and maintain a model of their own mental attitudes, (b) reason about other agents' mental attitudes, and (c) influence other agents' mental states. Social mental shaping is advocated as a general mechanism for attempting to have an impact on agents' mental states in order to increase their cooperativeness towards a joint decision. Our approach is to specify a novel, high‐level architecture for collaborative decision‐making in which the mentalistic notions of belief, desire, goal, intention, preference and commitment play a central role in guiding the individual agent's and the group's decision‐making behaviour. We identify preconditions that must be fulfilled before collaborative decision‐making can commence and prescribe how cooperating agents should behave, in terms of their own decision‐making apparatus and their interactions with others, when the decision‐making process is progressing satisfactorily. The model is formalized through a new, many‐sorted, multi‐modal logic.