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On Enactability of Agent Interaction Protocols: Towards a Unified Approach

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Book cover Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12058))

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Abstract

Interactions between agents are usually designed from a global viewpoint. However, the implementation of a multi-agent interaction is distributed. It is well known that this difference between the specification and the implementation levels can introduce problems, allowing designers to specify protocols from a global viewpoint that cannot be implemented as a collection of individual agents. This leads naturally to the question of whether a given (global) protocol is enactable, namely, whether it can be implemented in a distributed way. We consider this question in the powerful setting of trace expressions, considering a range of message ordering interpretations (specifying what it means to say that an interaction step occurs before another), and a range of possible constraints on the semantics of message delivery, corresponding to different properties of the underlying communication middleware. We provide a definition of enactability, along with an implementation of the definition that is applied to a number of example protocols.

Michael was at the University of Otago when this work was carried out.

A. Ferrando—Work supported by EPSRC as part of the ORCA [EP/R026173] and RAIN [EP/R026084] Robotics and AI Hubs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is a real example: in Italy, a law dating back to 1933 prevents students from being enrolled in more than one Italian course at university level at the same time; the only – recent – exception is being enrolled in a conservatory and in a university. The ambiguities in the law article are many, and appeals to the courts are in the thousands.

  2. 2.

    This notation has been used in the most recent papers on Trace Expressions [3, 5]; although not being standard, it is consistent with the background theory.

  3. 3.

    Binary operators associate from left, and are listed in decreasing order of precedence; that is, the first operator has the highest precedence. The operators “\({\vee }\)” and “\({\wedge }\)” are the standard notation for trace expressions.

  4. 4.

    http://erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/communication.html, Section 2.1, accessed on September 2019.

  5. 5.

    We extend the operator “\(\in \)” to denote membership of an item in a sequence.

  6. 6.

    The superscripts \(*\) and \(\omega \) are standard notations for (respectively) all finite (all infinite) sequences built from a given set.

  7. 7.

    An illustrative example is \(\tau = (M_1 \cdot M_2) \; | \; M_3\). This simple protocol has three sequences of interactions: \(\{ \langle M_1, M_2, M_3 \rangle , \langle M_1, M_3, M_2 \rangle , \langle M_3, M_1, M_2 \rangle \}\). Assuming an RS message ordering interpretation, then each of the message sequences corresponds to exactly one sequence of events, giving (where we abbreviate sending and receiving M as respectively M! and M?): \(\{ \langle M_1!, M_1?, M_2!, M_2?, M_3!, M_3?\rangle ,\) \(\langle M_1!, M_1?, M_3!, M_3?, M_2!, M_2? \rangle , \langle M_3!, M_3?, M_1!, M_1?, M_2!, M_2? \rangle \}\). However, the protocol does not specify any constraint on \(M_3\), so should also allow other interpretations where the occurrences of \(M_3!\) and \(M_3?\) are not constrained relative to the other events, for example \( \langle M_1!, M_1?, M_3!, M_2!, M_2?, M_3? \rangle \).

  8. 8.

    Note that in the first line we have an interaction protocol \(\tau _i\), and so the set of message events is given by determining the set of interaction events \(\mathcal {I}({\tau })\), and then determining the set of message events \(\mathcal {E}_{\mathcal {I}({\tau })}\). By contrast, in the second line, \(\tau _m\) is a message protocol, so we just determine the set of message events directly (\(\mathcal {E}_{}(\tau )\)).

  9. 9.

    We use \(\Vert \) to distinguish between parallel composition of different agents, and parallel composition within a protocol.

  10. 10.

    The code is available at http://enactability.altervista.org/.

  11. 11.

    We present a simplified version of the play date protocol introduced in [32], where we replaced a loop involving a choice among \( Req \), \( GiveInfo \), or \( Forget \), with a single iteration only.

  12. 12.

    http://www.swi-prolog.org.

  13. 13.

    http://emas.in.tu-clausthal.de/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Lars Braubach, Jomi Fred Hübner, and Agostino Poggi for their support in understanding the communication model supported by Jadex, Jason, and JADE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Liverpool University, Liverpool, UK

    Angelo Ferrando

  2. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Michael Winikoff

  3. University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Stephen Cranefield

  4. Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Frank Dignum

  5. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Frank Dignum

  6. CVUT Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

    Frank Dignum

  7. Genova University, Genova, Italy

    Viviana Mascardi

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  1. Angelo Ferrando
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Correspondence to Michael Winikoff .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Louise A. Dennis

  2. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Rafael H. Bordini

  3. University of York, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Yves Lespérance

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Ferrando, A., Winikoff, M., Cranefield, S., Dignum, F., Mascardi, V. (2020). On Enactability of Agent Interaction Protocols: Towards a Unified Approach. In: Dennis, L., Bordini, R., Lespérance, Y. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12058. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51417-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51417-4_3

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