Good Things Come to Those Who Wait: The Power of Sensing in Social Laws

Multiple agents operating in a shared environment can interfere with each other's ability to reach their goals. One of the approaches to address this issue is enacting a social law - a set of rules that restricts some possible behaviors of the agents. A social law that ensures that each agent can achieve its goal, regardless of what the other agents do, is called robust. Recent work has shown how to verify that a given social law, encoded in an MA-STRIPS formalism, is robust by compilation to classical planning. That work also introduced the notion of waitfor preconditions, which assumes that the agent can check if these preconditions hold before executing its scheduled action and withhold from acting otherwise. In this work, we explore the connection between waitfor preconditions and sensing. In particular, we establish the semantics behind the waitfor mechanism and connect it to the agent's sensing capabilities. Moreover, we reason about the expressive power of waitfors by juxtaposing environments where some sensing is allowed with “blind” environments. Using these insights, we derive methods for faster robustness validation, and present an empirical evaluation of these methods.