Abstract
Many practitioners view agent interaction protocols as rigid specifications that are defined a priori, and hard-code their agents with a set of protocols known at design time — an unnecessary restriction for intelligent and adaptive agents. To achieve the full potential of multi-agent systems, we believe that it is important that multi-agent interaction protocols are treated as first-class computational entities in systems. That is, they exist at runtime in systems as entities that can be referenced, inspected, composed, invoked and shared, rather than as abstractions that emerge from the behaviour of the participants. Using first-class protocols, a goal-directed agent can assess a library of protocols at runtime to determine which protocols best achieve a particular goal. In this paper, we presented three methods that enable agents to determine if a protocol achieves a specified goal. The two most promising approaches allow an agent to summarise a protocol that it has learned by calculating the outcomes achieved by the protocol, and annotate the protocol with these summaries. The agent can match, via annotations, which protocols in a library achieve a given goal.
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
Brak, R.L., Fleuriot, J.D., McGinnis, J.: Theorem proving for protocol languages. In: Proceedings of the European Union Multiagent Systems Workshop (2004)
Clement, B., Durfee, E.: Theory for coordinating concurrent hierarchical planning agents using summary information. In: Proceedings of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the Eleventh Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, pp. 495–502. AAAI, Menlo Park (1999)
De Boer, F.S., Gabbrielli, M., Marchiori, E., Palamidessi, C.: Proving concurrent constraint programs correct. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 19(5), 685–725 (1997)
Georgeff, M.P., Lansky, A.L.: Reactive reasoning and planning. In: Proc. of the 6th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 677–682 (1987)
Giordano, L., Martelli, A., Schwind, C.: Specialization of interaction protocols in a temporal action logic. Electronic Notes on Theoetical Computer Science 157(4), 3–22 (2006)
Hanks, S., McDermott, D.: Nonmonotonic logic and temporal projection. Artificial Intelligence 33(3), 379–412 (1987)
Harel, D., Kozen, D., Tiuryn, J.: Dynamic Logic. MIT Press, Cambridge (2000)
McGinnis, J., Miller, T.: Amongst first-class protocols. In: Artikis, A., O’Hare, G.M.P., Stathis, K., Vouros, G. (eds.) ESAW 2007. LNCS, vol. 4995, Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Miller, T., McBurney, P.: Executable logic for reasoning and annotation of first-class agent interaction protocols. TR ULCS-07-015, University of Liverpool, Dept of Computer Science (2007)
Miller, T., McBurney, P.: Using constraints and process algebra for specification of first-class agent interaction protocols. In: O’Hare, G.M.P., Ricci, A., O’Grady, M.J., Dikenelli, O. (eds.) ESAW 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4457, pp. 245–264. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Miller, T., McBurney, P.: On illegal composition of first-class agent interaction protocols. In: Dobbie, G., Mans, B. (eds.) Thirty-First Australasian Computer Science Conference. CRPIT, vol. 74, pp. 127–136. Australian Computer Society (2008)
Prendinger, H., Schurz, G.: Reasoning about action and change: A dynamic logic approach. Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 5(2), 209–245 (1996)
Zaremski, A., Wing, J.: Specification matching of software components. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 6(4), 333–369 (1997)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Miller, T., McBurney, P. (2009). Annotation and Matching of First-Class Agent Interaction Protocols. In: Rahwan, I., Moraitis, P. (eds) Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems. ArgMAS 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5384. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00207-6_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00207-6_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00206-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00207-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)