Abstract
Protocols enable unambiguous and smooth interactions among agents, and commitments among agents are a powerful means of developing protocols. Commitments allow flexible execution of protocols and help agents reason about protocols and plan their actions accordingly, while at the same time providing a basis for compliance checking. Multiagent systems that employ commitment-based interaction can conveniently and effectively model business interactions because the autonomy and heterogeneity of agents mirrors real-world businesses. Such modeling, however, requires multiagent systems to host a rich variety of interaction protocols that can capture the needs of different applications. We show how a commitment-based semantics for protocols provides a basis for refining and aggregating protocols. We propose an approach for designing commitment protocols wherein traditional software engineering notions such as refinement and aggregation are extended to apply to protocols. We present an algebra of protocols that can be used to compose protocols by refining and merging existing ones, and does this at a level of abstraction high enough to be useful for real-world applications.
We thank Amit Chopra and Nirmit Desai for valuable comments. This research was supported by the NSF under grant DST-0139037.
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Mallya, A.U., Singh, M.P. (2005). A Semantic Approach for Designing Commitment Protocols. In: van Eijk, R.M., Huget, MP., Dignum, F. (eds) Agent Communication. AC 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3396. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32258-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32258-0_3
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