Juan M. Serrano
ABSTRACT
The social stance advocated by institutional frameworks and most multiagent system methodologies has resulted in a wide spectrum of organizational and communicative abstractions which have found currency in several programming frameworks and software platforms. Still, these tools and frameworks are designed to support a limited range of interaction capabilities that constrain developers to a fixed set of particular, pre-defined abstractions. The main hypothesis motivating this paper is that the variety of multiagent interaction mechanisms -- both, organizational and communicative, share a common semantic core. In the realm of software architectures, the paper proposes a connector-based model of multiagent interactions which attempts to identify the essential structure underlying multiagent interactions. Furthermore, the paper also provides this model with a formal execution semantics which describes the dynamics of social interactions. The proposed model is intended as the abstract machine of an organizational programming language which allows programmers to accommodate an open set of interaction mechanisms.
- R. Allen and D. Garlan. A Formal Basis for Architectural Connection. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 6(3):213--249, June 1997. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- J. L. Arcos, M. Esteva, P. Noriega, J. A. Rodríguez, and C. Sierra. Engineering open environments with electronic institutions. Journal on Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 18(2):191--204, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G. Boella, R. Damiano, J. Hulstijn, and L. W. N. van der Torre. Role-based semantics for agent communication: embedding of the 'mental attitudes' and 'social commitments' semantics. In AAMAS, pages 688--690, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. H. Bordini, L. Braubach, M. Dastani, A. E. F. Seghrouchni, J. J. G. Sanz, J. Leite, G. O'Hare, A. Pokahr, and A. Ricci. A survey of programming languages and platforms for multiagent systems. Informatica, 30:33--44, 2006.Google Scholar
- R. H. Bordini, J. F. Hübner, and R. Vieira. Jason and the golden fleece of agent-oriented programming. In R. H. Bordini, D. M., J. Dix, and A. El Fallah Seghrouchni, editors, Multiagent Programming: Languages, Platforms and Applications, chapter 1. Springer-Verlag, 2005.Google Scholar
- O. Cliffe, M. D. Vos, and J. A. Padget. Specifying and analysing agent-based social institutions using answer set programming. In EUMAS, pages 476--477, 2005.Google Scholar
- V. Dignum, J. Vázquez-Salceda, and F. Dignum. Omni: Introducing social structure, norms and ontologies into agent organizations. In R. Bordini, M. Dastani, J. Dix, and A. Seghrouchni, editors, Programming Multiagent Systems Second International Workshop ProMAS 2004, volume 3346 of LNAI, pages 181--198. Springer, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Esteva, D. de la Cruz, and C. Sierra. ISLANDER: an electronic institutions editor. In M. Gini, T. Ishida, C. Castelfranchi, and W. L. Johnson, editors, Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'02), pages 1045--1052. ACM Press, July 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Esteva, B. Rosell, J. A. Rodríguez-Aguilar, and J. L. Arcos. AMELI: An agent-based middleware for electronic institutions. In Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, volume 1, pages 236--243, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Ferber, O. Gutknecht, and F. Michel. From agents to organizations: An organizational view of multiagent systems. In AOSE, pages 214--230, 2003.Google Scholar
- Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. FIPA Interaction Protocol Library Specification. http://www.fipa.org/repository/ips.html, 2003.Google Scholar
- A. García-Camino, J. A. Rodríguez-Aguilar, C. Sierra, and W. Vasconcelos. Norm-oriented programming of electronic institutions. In AAMAS, pages 670--672, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- O. Gutknecht and J. Ferber. The MADKIT agent platform architecture. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1887:48--55, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- JADE. The JADE project home page. http://jade.cselt.it, 2005.Google Scholar
- M. Luck, P. McBurney, O. Shehory, and S. Willmott. Agent Technology: Computing as Interaction -- A Roadmap for Agent-Based Computing. AgentLink III, 2005.Google Scholar
- P. McBurney and S. Parsons. A formal framework for inter-agent dialogues. In J. P. Müller, E. Andre, S. Sen, and C. Frasson, editors, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents, pages 178--179, Montreal, Canada, May 2001. ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- N. R. Mehta, N. Medvidovic, and S. Phadke. Towards a taxonomy of software connectors. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 178--187. ACM Press, June 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Pavón and J. Gómez-Sanz. Agent oriented software engineering with ingenias. In V. Marik, J. Muller, and M. Pechoucek, editors, Proceedings of the 3rd International Central and Eastern European Conference on Multiagent Systems. Springer Verlag, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. C. Pierce. Types and Programming Languages. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Pitt, L. Kamara, M. Sergot, and A. Artikis. Voting in multiagent systems. Feb. 27 2006.Google Scholar
- G. Plotkin. A structural approach to operational semantics. Technical Report DAIMI FN-19, Aarhus University, Sept. 1981.Google Scholar
- J. Searle. Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press, 1969.Google Scholar
- M. Sergot. A computational theory of normative positions. ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 2(4):581--622, Oct. 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. P. Singh. Agent-based abstractions for software development. In F. Bergenti, M.-P. Gleizes, and F. Zambonelli, editors, Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems, chapter 1, pages 5--18. Kluwer, 2004.Google Scholar
- S. Willmot and al. Agentcities / opennet testbed. http://x-opennet.net, 2004.Google Scholar
- F. Zambonelli, N. R. Jennings, and M. Wooldridge. Developing multiagent systems: The Gaia methodology. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 12(3):317--370, July 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Operational semantics of multiagent interactions
Recommendations
Programming mobile intelligent agents: An operational semantics
This paper presents the operational semantics of an agent-oriented programming language called CLAIM. CLAIM allows to design multi-agent systems that support both stationary and mobile agents, endowed with cognitive capabilities and able to communicate. ...
An operational semantics for ZCCS
ICFEM '97: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Formal Engineering MethodsG. Bruns (1995) has proposed a version of value-passing CCS in which an agent language, based on that proposed by Milner, is augmented with a rich data language. The data language can be used to describe sets, tuples and sequences etc. constructed from ...
Equivalence of Denotational and Operational Semantics for Interaction Languages
Theoretical Aspects of Software EngineeringAbstractMessage Sequence Charts (MSC) and Sequence Diagrams (SD) are graphical models representing the behaviours of distributed and concurrent systems via the scheduling of discrete emission and reception events. So as to exploit them in formal methods, ...
Comments