Combining dynamic deontic logic and temporal logic for the specification of deadlines

Abstract

Intelligent agents have an agenda that is monitored continuously to decide what action is to be performed. Formally, an agenda is a set of deontic temporal constraints. Deontic, since the agenda specifies what the agent should do. Temporal, since the obligation is usually to be performed before a certain deadline, or as soon as possible. In this paper, we investigate the concepts necessary to describe deadlines. We describe a temporal deontic logic that facilitates reasoning about obligations and deadlines. The logic is a combination of temporal logic and deontic dynamic logic. We describe extensively which choices have to be made in combining temporal and dynamic aspects into one system. In the new logic, we can uniformally specify that an obligation starts at a certain time or event, that it must be done immediately, as soon as possible, before a deadline, or periodically.