Answer set programming for representing and reasoning about virtual institutions

It is recognised that institutions are potentially powerful means for making agent interactions effective and efficient, but institutions will only really be useful when, as in other safety-critical scenarios, it is possible to prove that particular properties do or do not hold for all possible encounters. In contrast to symbolic model-checking, answer set programming permits the statement of problems and queries in domain-specific terms as executable logic programs, thus eliminating the gap between specification and verification language. Furthermore, results are presented in the same terms. In this paper we describe the use of answer set programs as an institutional modelling technique. We demonstrate that our institutional model can be intuitively be mapped into an answer set program such that the ordered event traces of the former can be obtained as the answer sets of the latter, allowing for an easy way to query properties of models.