Monitoring time-aware commitments within agent-based simulation environments

Despite their dynamic nature, social commitments have rarely been used for monitoring purposes. Little attention has been paid to the relationship between commitments and the temporal dimension and to the corresponding run-time verification. Building on previous work, we present a declarative axiomatization of time-aware social commitments, extending their basic life cycle with time-related transitions and compensation mechanisms. The formalization is based on a reactive version of the event calculus, able to monitor the commitment's evolution during a system's execution, to check whether the interacting agents are honoring them or not. The resulting monitoring framework can be used in the context of agent-based simulation, either to dynamically evaluate whether a running simulation is compliant with a commitment-based contract or to provide useful information to the interacting agents, helping them to behave in a compliant manner.