Abstract
Inspired by the recent problems in supply chains, we propose an approach to declarative modeling of contracts between agents that will eventually support reasoning about resilience of and about ways to improve supply chains. Specifically, we present a high-level language for specifying and reasoning about contracts over action domains of agents. We assume that the behavior of the agents can be formally expressed through action theories and view a contract as a collection of constraints. Each constraint specifies the responsibility of an agent to achieve a certain result by a deadline. Each agent also has a mapping between constraints and the agent’s concerns, i.e. issues that the agent is concerned about, which are modeled in accordance with the CPS Framework proposed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. We discuss how common questions related to the fulfillment of a contract or the concerns of the agents can be answered and computed via Answer Set Programming.
Portions of this publication and research effort are made possible through the help and support of NIST via cooperative agreement 70NANB21H167. Son Tran was also partially supported by the NSF grants 1812628 and 1914635.
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- 1.
Throughout the paper, we only discuss contracts between two agents but the formalization is easily adapted for contracts among multiple agents.
- 2.
Observe that we have simplified the contract slightly as there is no mention about the tractor trailers. This can be easily encoded if we extend the action domains of H and L to consider the shipping company.
- 3.
A thorough discussion on requirements is beyond the scope of this paper. Thus, for compactness, we use short requirement names, although in practice a requirement would be spelled out in more details, e.g. the requirement that here we call match-customer-expected-grade would likely be expressed by a statement “lumber shall be produced in a grade matching the customer’s expectations.”.
- 4.
For convenience, we often use first order logic literals under the assumption that they represent all suitable ground instantiations.
- 5.
We note that given an action domain D, the ontology CPS, and a contract \(\mathcal {C}\), these three programs can be automatically generated by a Prolog program similar to that provided in https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~tson/ASPlan/Knowledge/.
- 6.
In each rule with T as variable, we omit step(T) from the right hand side.
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Flynn, D., Nadeau, C., Shantz, J., Balduccini, M., Son, T.C., Griffor, E.R. (2023). Formalizing and Reasoning About Supply Chain Contracts Between Agents. In: Hanus, M., Inclezan, D. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13880. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24841-2_10
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