Resource Action-Based Bounded ATL: A New Logic for MAS to Express a Cost Over the Actions

In both human society and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), actions entail costs due to resource limitations such as energy consumption and communication bandwidth. Consideration of these constraints is crucial during MAS design and implementation, especially regarding agents’ ability to achieve temporal objectives. Resource Bounded ATL (RB-ATL) extends ATL to accommodate resource limitations but struggles to isolate costs to individual actions. Agents’ actions can be influenced by others, affecting cooperation or competition. To address these complexities, we introduce Resource Action-based Bounded ATL (RAB-ATL), which considers actions’ costs in relation to other agents’ actions within the same state. RAB-ATL enhances understanding and introduces strategic considerations at the resource handling level, offering a more comprehensive approach to agent interaction. Additionally, we analyse the model checking complexity for RAB-ATL and show that it remains consistent with that of RB-ATL. Finally, we present a resulting implementation of the technique and its application to an existing case study.