decidability property is due to the fact that although
agents can produce resources, the production should
not exceed the initial availability of the resources.
Such a restriction to the notion of production makes
sense as, in practical terms, it allows one to model sig-
nificant real-world scenarios, such as, acquiring mem-
ory by a program, leasing a car during a travel, and,
in general, any scenario in which an agent is releasing
resources previously acquired.
We also tackle the problem of coalition forma-
tion. How and why agents should aggregate is not
a new issue and has been deeply investigated, in
past and recent years, in various frameworks, as for
example in algorithmic game theory, argumentation
settings, and logic-based knowledge representation,
see (Wooldridge and Dunne, 2006; Dunne et al.,
2010; Bulling and Dix, 2010). Analogously to what
has been done in (Della Monica et al., 2011) for
PRB-ATL, here we face this problem in the setting of
priced resource-bounded agents with the goal speci-
fied by an PRB-AMC formula. In particular we study
the problem of determining the minimal cost coali-
tions of agents acting in accordance to rules expressed
by a priced game arena and satisfying a given for-
mula. We show that also the optimal coalition prob-
lem is in EXPTIME and has a PSPACE lower bound.
Finally, we show that the satisfiability problem of
PRB-AMC is undecidable, when the game is played
on a one-point arena, that is, the underlying graph is
constituted by a single vertex. (Notice that such an
undecidability result does not immediately extend to
generic graphs.) While the result seems to be weak
per se, we conjecture that the problem is undecidable
in the general setting and we hope to use the present
result as a preliminary step towards the proof of the
general case.
2 SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS
The scenario is the same as PRB-ATL. So, we have
a set A G of n agents, a set RES of r resources, the
set M = (N∪{∞})
r
of resource availabilities, the set
N = (N ∪ {∞})
n
of money availabilities, where N is
the set of all natural numbers 0,1,2,.... We let
~
b,~m
range over M and
~
$ range over N . Moreover, given a
vector
~
$, we will refer to the component correspond-
ing to the agent a as
~
$[a].
On the logical side, we use a set of atomic propo-
sitions Π and a set of fixpoint variables VAR, to be
used in µ-calculus formulas. The syntax of formulas
is as follows:
φ ::= p | X | ¬φ | φ∧ φ | hhA
~
$
ii φ | µX.φ(X) | ∼
~
b
where p ∈ Π, X ∈ VAR, A ⊆ A G ,
~
$ ∈ N ,
~
b ∈ M
and ∼∈ {<, >, =, ≤, ≥}. Moreover, µX.φ(X) is de-
fined only when X occurs in an even number of nega-
tions in φ, so that formulas define monotonic opera-
tors on sets and we can apply Knaster-Tarski Fixpoint
Theorem (Tarski, 1955). Recall that the greatest fix-
point operator νX.φ(X) can be defined as usual, that
is, νX.φ(X) = ¬µX.¬φ(¬X).
The semantics is based on priced game structures
with environment, i.e., tuples G = (Q,π,ENV, d,qty,
δ,ρ). They are analogous to the priced game struc-
tures used in (Della Monica et al., 2011), the only
new ingredient being the environment ENV : VAR →
2
Q×M
, with which we can evaluate formulas contain-
ing fixpoint variables. Recall that:
The semantics is based on priced game struc-
tures with environment analogous to the ones used
in (Della Monica et al., 2011), i.e. tuples G =
(Q,π,ENV,d,qty, δ, ρ); here there is one extra fea-
ture, that is an environment ENV : VAR → 2
Q×M
,
with which we can evaluate formulas containing fix-
point variables. Recall that:
• Q is a finite set of locations, usually denoted
q,q
1
,q
2
,....
• π : Q → 2
Π
is a labeling function assigning to each
location the set of all atomic propositions which
are true on it.
• d(q,a) is the number of actions available for the
agent a on state q. We code actions with num-
bers from 1 to d(q,a). We assume that d(q,a) ≥ 1
(there is always at least one action available) and
the action 1 means “doing nothing”.
For each location q ∈ Q and team A =
{a
1
,... ,a
k
} ⊆ A G , we denote by D
A
(q) the set
of action profiles available to the team A at the
location q, defined as D
A
(q) = {1,..., d(q,a
1
)}×
... × {1,..., d(q, a
k
)}. For the sake of readability,
we denote D
A G
(q) by D(q). Given a team A, an
agent a ∈ A, and an action profile
~
α
A
, we will re-
fer to the component of the vector
~
α
A
correspond-
ing to the agent a as
~
α
A
[a]. Actions (resp., action
profiles) are usually denoted by α,α
1
,... (resp.,
~
α,
~
α
1
,...).
• qty(q,a,α) is an element of Z
r
representing the
quantity of resources consumed or produced by
the agent a while performing the action α ∈
d(q,a) on the location q (Z is the set of integers).
Positive components represent resource produc-
tions, negative ones represent resource consump-
tions. qty(q, a, 1) is the zero vector, for all q ∈ Q,
a ∈ A G . With an abuse of notation we also de-
note by qty the function defining the amount of re-
sources required by an action profile
~
α
A
∈ D
A
(q),
that is qty(q,
~
α
A
) =
∑
a∈A
qty(q,a,
~
α
A
(a)).
ON A PRICED RESOURCE-BOUNDED ALTERNATING μ-CALCULUS
223