Abstract
Whereas commitments capture how an agent relates with another agent, (private) goals describe states of the world that an agent is motivated to bring about. Researchers have observed that goals and commitments are complementary, but have not yet developed a combined operational semantics for them. This paper makes steps towards such a semantics by relating the respective lifecycles of goals and commitments. We study how the the concepts cohere for one agent and how they engender cooperation between agents. We illustrate our approach via a real-world scenario in the domain of aerospace aftermarket services. We state how our semantics yields important desirable properties, including convergence of the configurations of cooperating agents, thereby delineating some theoretically well-founded yet practical modes of cooperation in a multiagent system.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
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
Avali, V.R., Huhns, M.N.: Commitment-Based Multiagent Decision Making. In: Klusch, M., Pěchouček, M., Polleres, A. (eds.) CIA 2008. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5180, pp. 249–263. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Braubach, L., Pokahr, A.: Representing Long-Term and Interest BDI Goals. In: Braubach, L., Briot, J.-P., Thangarajah, J. (eds.) ProMAS 2009. LNCS, vol. 5919, pp. 201–218. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Chopra, A.K., Dalpiaz, F., Giorgini, P., Mylopoulos, J.: Reasoning about agents and protocols via goals and commitments. In: Proc. AAMAS, pp. 457–464 (2010)
Dalpiaz, F., Chopra, A.K., Giorgini, P., Mylopoulos, J.: Adaptation in Open Systems: Giving Interaction Its Rightful Place. In: Parsons, J., Saeki, M., Shoval, P., Woo, C., Wand, Y. (eds.) ER 2010. LNCS, vol. 6412, pp. 31–45. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Desai, N., Chopra, A.K., Singh, M.P.: Amoeba: A methodology for modeling and evolution of cross-organizational business processes. ACM Trans. Software Engineering and Methodology 19(2), 6:1–6:45 (2009)
Grosz, B., Kraus, S.: Collaborative plans for complex group action. Artificial Intelliegence 86(2), 269–357 (1996)
Hindriks, K.V., van der Hoek, W., van Riemsdijk, M.B.: Agent programming with temporally extended goals. In: Proc. AAMAS, pp. 137–144 (2009)
Lesser, V., Decker, K., Wagner, T., Carver, N., Garvey, A., Horling, B., Neiman, D., Podorozhny, R., NagendraPrasad, M., Raja, A., Vincent, R., Xuan, P., Zhang, X.: Evolution of the GPGP/TAEMS Domain-Independent Coordination Framework. J. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 9(1), 87–143 (2004)
van Riemsdijk, M.B., Dastani, M., Winikoff, M.: Goals in agent systems. In: Proc. AAMAS, pp. 713–720 (2008)
Singh, M.P.: An ontology for commitments in multiagent systems. AI and Law 7, 97–113 (1999)
Telang, P.R., Singh, M.P.: Enhancing Tropos with Commitments. In: Borgida, A.T., Chaudhri, V.K., Giorgini, P., Yu, E.S. (eds.) Conceptual Modeling: Foundations and Applications. LNCS, vol. 5600, pp. 417–435. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Telang, P.R., Singh, M.P.: Specifying and verifying cross-organizational business models. IEEE Trans. Services Comput. 4 (2011)
Telang, P.R., Singh, M.P., Yorke-Smith, N.: A coupled operational semantics for goals and commitments (2012), working paper
Thangarajah, J., Harland, J., Morley, D., Yorke-Smith, N.: Operational Behaviour for Executing, Suspending, and Aborting Goals in BDI Agent Systems. In: Omicini, A., Sardina, S., Vasconcelos, W. (eds.) DALT 2010. LNCS, vol. 6619, pp. 1–21. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
van Aart, C.J., Chábera, J., Dehn, M., Jakob, M., Nast-Kolb, K., Smulders, J.L.C.F., Storms, P.P.A., Holt, C., Smith, M.: Use case outline and requirements. Deliverable D6.1, IST CONTRACT Project (2007), http://tinyurl.com/6adejz
Winikoff, M.: Implementing commitment-based interactions. In: Proc. AAMAS, pp. 873–880 (2007)
Winikoff, M., Padgham, L., Harland, J., Thangarajah, J.: Declarative and procedural goals in intelligent agent systems. In: Proc. KR, pp. 470–481 (2002)
Winikoff, M., Dastani, M., van Riemsdijk, M.B.: A unified interaction-aware goal framework. In: Proc. ECAI, pp. 1033–1034 (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Telang, P.R., Singh, M.P., Yorke-Smith, N. (2012). Relating Goal and Commitment Semantics. In: Dennis, L., Boissier, O., Bordini, R.H. (eds) Programming Multi-Agent Systems. ProMAS 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7217. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31915-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31915-0_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31914-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31915-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)