Abstract
What distinguishes multiagent systems from other software systems is their emphasis on the interactions among autonomous, heterogeneous agents. This paper motivates and characterizes correctness properties for multiagent systems. These properties are centered on commitments, and capture correctness at a high level. In contrast to existing approaches, commitments underlie key correctness primitives understood in terms of meaning; for example, commitment alignment maps to interoperability; commitment discharge maps to compliance. This paper gives illustrative examples and characterizations of these and other properties. The properties cover the specification of the principal artifacts—protocols, roles, and agents—of an interaction-based approach to designing multiagent systems, and thus provide the formal underpinnings of the approach.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Desai, N., Chopra, A.K., Singh, M.P.: Amoeba: A methodology for modeling and evolution of cross-organizational business processes. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) 19(2) (to appear, April 2010)
Desai, N., Chopra, A.K., Arrott, M., Specht, B., Singh, M.P.: Engineering foreign exchange processes via commitment protocols. In: Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC), pp. 514–521. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2007)
Bresciani, P., Perini, A., Giorgini, P., Giunchiglia, F., Mylopoulos, J.: Tropos: An agent-oriented software development methodology. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 8(3), 203–236 (2004)
Desai, N., Mallya, A.U., Chopra, A.K., Singh, M.P.: Interaction protocols as design abstractions for business processes. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 31(12), 1015–1027 (2005)
Baldoni, M., Baroglio, C., Martelli, A., Patti, V.: A priori conformance verification for guaranteeing interoperability in open environments. In: Dan, A., Lamersdorf, W. (eds.) ICSOC 2006. LNCS, vol. 4294, pp. 339–351. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Fournet, C., Hoare, C.A.R., Rajamani, S.K., Rehof, J.: Stuck-free conformance. In: Alur, R., Peled, D.A. (eds.) CAV 2004. LNCS, vol. 3114, pp. 242–254. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Giordano, L., Martelli, A.: Verifying agent conformance with protocols specified in a temporal action logic. In: Basili, R., Pazienza, M.T. (eds.) AI*IA 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4733, pp. 145–156. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
van der Aalst, W., van Hee, K.: Workflow Management Models, Methods, and Systems. MIT Press, Cambridge (2002)
Chopra, A.K., Singh, M.P.: Multiagent commitment alignment. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS), Columbia, SC, IFAAMAS, May 2009, pp. 937–944 (2009)
Hohfeld, W.N.: Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning and other Legal Essays. Yale University Press, New Haven (1919); A 1919 printing of articles from 1913
Singh, M.P.: An ontology for commitments in multiagent systems: Toward a unification of normative concepts. Artificial Intelligence and Law 7, 97–113 (1999)
Singh, M.P.: Semantical considerations on dialectical and practical commitments. In: Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), July 2008, pp. 176–181. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2008)
Walton, D.N., Krabbe, E.C.W.: Commitment in Dialogue: Basic Concepts of Interpersonal Reasoning. State University of New York Press, Albany (1995)
OMG: The Object Management Group’s Model Driven Architecture, MDA (2006), http://www.omg.org/mda/
Jain, A.K., Aparicio IV, M., Singh, M.P.: Agents for process coherence in virtual enterprises. Communications of the ACM 42(3), 62–69 (1999)
Chopra, A.K., Singh, M.P.: Contextualizing commitment protocols. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 1345–1352 (2006)
Desai, N., Singh, M.P.: A modular action description language for protocol composition. In: Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), July 2007, pp. 962–967. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2007)
Desai, N., Singh, M.P.: On the enactability of business protocols. In: Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), July 2008, pp. 1126–1131. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2008)
Mallya, A.U., Singh, M.P.: An algebra for commitment protocols. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 14(2), 143–163 (2007)
AMQP: Advanced message queuing protocol (2007), http://www.amqp.org
Lamport, L.: Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system. Communications of the ACM 21(7), 558–565 (1978)
Chopra, A.K., Singh, M.P.: Constitutive interoperability. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS), May 2008, pp. 797–804 (2008)
Alur, R., Henzinger, T.A., Kupferman, O., Vardi, M.Y.: Alternating refinement relations. In: Sangiorgi, D., de Simone, R. (eds.) CONCUR 1998. LNCS, vol. 1466, pp. 163–178. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)
Venkatraman, M., Singh, M.P.: Verifying compliance with commitment protocols: Enabling open Web-based multiagent systems. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2(3), 217–236 (1999)
Parnas, D.L.: Information distribution aspects of design methodology. In: Proceedings of the International Federation for Information Processing Congress, vol. TA-3, pp. 26–30. North Holland, Amsterdam (1971)
Hohpe, G., Woolf, B.: Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions. Signature Series. Addison-Wesley, Boston (2004)
Harel, D., Gery, E.: Executable object modeling with statecharts. IEEE Computer 30(7), 31–42 (1997)
Singh, M.P.: Distributed enactment of multiagent workflows: Temporal logic for service composition. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS), July 2003, pp. 907–914. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Pesic, M., Schonenberg, M.H., Sidorova, N., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Constraint-based workflow models: Change made easy. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds.) OTM 2007, Part I. LNCS, vol. 4803, pp. 77–94. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Wu, Q., Pu, C., Sahai, A., Barga, R.S.: Categorization and optimization of synchronization dependencies in business processes. In: Proceedings of the 23nd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), pp. 306–315. IEEE, Los Alamitos (2007)
FIPA: FIPA interaction protocol specifications, FIPA: The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (2003), http://www.fipa.org/repository/ips.html
Odell, J., Parunak, H.V.D., Bauer, B.: Representing agent interaction protocols in UML. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE (2001)
Benatallah, B., Casati, F., Toumani, F.: Representing, analysing and managing web service protocols. Data & Knowledge Engineering 58(3), 327–357 (2006)
Bultan, T., Fu, X., Hull, R., Su, J.: Conversation specification: A new approach to design and analysis of e-service composition. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), pp. 403–410 (2003)
Dastani, M., Arbab, F., de Boer, F.S.: Coordination and composition in multi-agent systems. In: Proceedings of the 4rd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pp. 439–446. ACM, New York (2005)
Honda, K., Yoshida, N., Carbone, M.: Multiparty asynchronous session types. In: Proceedings of the 35th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL). ACM, New York (2008)
Singh, M.P., Chopra, A.K., Desai, N.: Commitment-based SOA. IEEE Computer 42 (accepted 2009), http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/papers/
Foster, H., Uchitel, S., Magee, J., Kramer, J.: Model-based analysis of obligations in web service choreography. In: Proceedings of the Advanced International Conference on Telecommunications and International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services (AICT-ICIW), pp. 149–156 (2006)
Lomuscio, A., Qu, H., Solanki, M.: Towards verifying compliance in agent-based web service compositions. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS), Columbia, SC, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, pp. 265–272 (2008)
Malone, T.W., Crowston, K., Herman, G.A. (eds.): Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook. MIT Press, Cambridge (2003)
Grosof, B.N., Poon, T.C.: SweetDeal: Representing agent contracts with exceptions using XML rules, ontologies, and process descriptions. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the World Wide Web, pp. 340–349 (2003)
Wyner, G.M., Lee, J.: Defining specialization for process models. In: [40], pp. 131–174. MIT Press, Cambridge (2003)
Hull, R.: Artifact-centric business process models: Brief survey of research results and challenge. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds.) OTM 2008, Part II. LNCS, vol. 5332, pp. 1152–1163. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Fornara, N., Colombetti, M.: Defining interaction protocols using a commitment-based agent communication language. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), July 2003, pp. 520–527. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Rovatsos, M.: Dynamic semantics for agent communication languages. In: Proceedings of the 6th international Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pp. 1–8 (2007)
Yolum, P., Singh, M.P.: Commitment machines. In: Meyer, J.-J.C., Tambe, M. (eds.) ATAL 2001. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2333, pp. 235–247. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Yolum, P., Singh, M.P.: Flexible protocol specification and execution: Applying event calculus planning using commitments. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS), July 2002, pp. 527–534. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Winikoff, M., Liu, W., Harland, J.: Enhancing commitment machines. In: Leite, J., Omicini, A., Torroni, P., Yolum, p. (eds.) DALT 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3476, pp. 198–220. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Johnson, M.W., McBurney, P., Parsons, S.: When are two protocols the same? In: Huget, M.-P. (ed.) Communication in Multiagent Systems. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2650, pp. 253–268. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Amgoud, L., Maudet, N., Parsons, S.: An argumentation-based semantics for agent communication languages. In: Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), pp. 38–42. IOS Press, Amsterdam (2002)
Norman, T.J., Carbogim, D.V., Krabbe, E.C.W., Walton, D.N.: Argument and multi-agent systems. In: Reed, C., Norman, T.J. (eds.) Argumentation Machines. Kluwer, Dordrecht (2004)
Bergenti, F., Gleizes, M.P., Zambonelli, F. (eds.): Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems. Kluwer, Boston (2004)
Henderson-Sellers, B., Giorgini, P. (eds.): Agent-Oriented Methodologies. Idea Group, Hershey (2005)
Garcia-Ojeda, J.C., DeLoach, S.A., Robby, O.W.H., Valenzuela, J.: O-MaSE: A customizable approach to developing multiagent processes. In: Luck, M., Padgham, L. (eds.) Agent-Oriented Software Engineering VIII. LNCS, vol. 4951, pp. 1–15. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Singh, M.P., Chopra, A.K. (2010). Correctness Properties for Multiagent Systems. In: Baldoni, M., Bentahar, J., van Riemsdijk, M.B., Lloyd, J. (eds) Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies VII. DALT 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5948. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11355-0_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11355-0_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-11354-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-11355-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)