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Specifying and resolving preferences among agent interaction patterns

Published: 08 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

A strength of commitment protocols is that they enable agents to act flexibly, thereby enabling them to accommodate varying local policies and respond to exceptions. A consequent weakness is that commitment protocols thus fail to distinguish between possible executions that are normal and those that may be allowed but are not ideal. This paper develops an approach for specifying preferences among executions that are allowed by a protocol. It captures sets of executions via an event constraint specification language and gives them a denotational characterization based on branching-time models. This paper develops algorithms for choosing the best execution path by considering the interplay between the preference specification of a protocol and local policies of agents interacting using the protocol, thereby giving the specifications a natural operational characterization. The value of the concepts developed is illustrated by its application to a recent practical framework for protocols called OWL-P. Further, the paper shows that the operational and denotational characterizations of preference specifications coincide.

References

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N. Desai, A. U. Mallya, A. K. Chopra, and M. P. Singh. OWL-P: A methodology for business process modeling and enactment. In AAMAS AOIS Workshop, July 2005.
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N. Desai, A. U. Mallya, A. K. Chopra, and M. P. Singh. Interaction protocols as design abstractions for business processes. IEEE Trans. Software Engg., 31(12):1015--1027, 2006.
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N. Fornara and M. Colombetti. Defining interaction protocols using a commitment-based agent communication language. In Proc. 2nd AAMAS, pp. 520--527. ACM Press, July 2003.
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B. N. Grosof and T. C. Poon. SweetDeal: Representing agent contracts with exceptions using XML rules, ontologies, and process descriptions. In Proc. WWW 2003, pp. 340--349.
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A. U. Mallya, P. Yolum, and M. P. Singh. Resolving commitments among autonomous agents. In F. Dignum, editor, Advances in Agent Communication, vol. 2922 of LNAI, pp. 166--182, Berlin, 2003. Springer-Verlag.
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P. Pasquier and B. Chaib-Draa. The cognitive coherence approach for agent communication pragmatics. In Proc. 2nd AAMAS, pp. 544--551. ACM Press, July 2003.
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M. P. Singh. Distributed enactment of multiagent workflows: Temporal logic for web service composition. In Proc. 2nd AAMAS, pp. 907--914. ACM Press, July 2003.
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S. van Otterloo, W. van der Hoek, and M. Wooldridge. Preferences in game logics. In Proc. 3rd AAMAS, pp. 152--159. ACM Press, July 2004.
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M. Winikoff, W. Liu, and J. Harland. Enhancing commitment machines. In Proc. AAMAS DALT Workshop, 2004.
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Cited By

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  • (2011)Monitoring Service Systems from a Language-Action PerspectiveIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2010.414:1(17-30)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2011
  • (2007)The IEEE FIPA approach to integrating software agents and web servicesProceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems10.1145/1329125.1329458(1-7)Online publication date: 14-May-2007

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    AAMAS '06: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
    May 2006
    1631 pages
    ISBN:1595933034
    DOI:10.1145/1160633
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 08 May 2006

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    View all
    • (2011)Monitoring Service Systems from a Language-Action PerspectiveIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2010.414:1(17-30)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2011
    • (2007)The IEEE FIPA approach to integrating software agents and web servicesProceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems10.1145/1329125.1329458(1-7)Online publication date: 14-May-2007

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