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International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems

EMAS 2021: Engineering Multi-Agent Systems pp 312–331Cite as

A Practical Framework for General Dialogue-Based Bilateral Interactions

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13190))

Abstract

For autonomous agents and services to cooperate and interact in multi-agent environments they require well-defined protocols. A multitude of protocol languages for multi-agent systems have been proposed in the past, but they have mostly remained theoretical or have limited prototypical implementations. This work proposes a practical realisation of a general framework for defining dialogue-based bilateral interaction protocols which supports arbitrary agent-based interactions. Crucially, this work is tightly integrated with a modern framework for the creation of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, making it possible to go from protocols’ specification to their implementation and usage by agents, and enables evaluation of protocols’ effectiveness and applicability in real-world use cases.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The AEA framework’s repository can be found at https://github.com/fetchai/agents-aea.

  2. 2.

    See https://yaml.org.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Fetch.ai for supporting this research and the release of its implementation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fetch.ai, Cambridge, UK

    Seyed Ali Hosseini, David Minarsch & Marco Favorito

  2. Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Marco Favorito

Authors
  1. Seyed Ali Hosseini
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  2. David Minarsch
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  3. Marco Favorito
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Seyed Ali Hosseini .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Natasha Alechina

  2. University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Matteo Baldoni

  3. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Brian Logan

Appendices

A Protocol Specification

figure a

Listing 1 shows the protocol specification corresponding with bilateral negotiation in Sect.  3.2. Protocol specifications are formatted in YAML.Footnote 2 and consist of three YAML documents (enclosed between \(---\) and ...):

  • The first document contains basic information about the protocol as well as its speech-acts. Speech-acts are each listed as key-values, where the key is the performative and the value is a dictionary of its contents specifying their name and type. For example, \( cfp \) has one content, named \(\mathtt {e}\) whose type is \(\mathtt {ct:Resource}\). The specification also comes with a language-independent type system. A summary of the types are in Table 1.

  • The second document contains protocol buffer schema snippet of any custom types defined for speech-act contents.

  • The third document contains the dialogue definitions where the fields are self-explanatory and correspond with definitions in Sect. 3.1.

Table 1. Protocol specification content types
Full size table

B Protocol Buffer Schema

figure b

An example of the protocol buffer schema that the protocol generator produces from the specification in Listing 1 is given in Listing 2.

C Instructions on Using the Framework

Note that detailed and up-to-date instructions can be found at https://github.com/fetchai/agents-aea.

figure c

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Hosseini, S.A., Minarsch, D., Favorito, M. (2022). A Practical Framework for General Dialogue-Based Bilateral Interactions. In: Alechina, N., Baldoni, M., Logan, B. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13190. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97457-2_18

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