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An algebra for commitment protocols

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Abstract

Protocols enable unambiguous, smooth interactions among agents. Commitments among agents are a powerful means of developing protocols. Commitments enable flexible execution of protocols and help agents reason about protocols and plan their actions accordingly, while at the same time providing a basis for compliance checking. Multiagent systems based on commitments can conveniently and effectively model business interactions because the autonomy and heterogeneity of agents mirrors real-world businesses. Such modeling, however, requires multiagent systems to host a rich variety of protocols that can capture the needs of different applications. We show how a commitment-based semantics provides a basis for refining and aggregating protocols. We propose an approach for designing commitment protocols wherein traditional software engineering notions such as refinement and aggregation are extended to apply to protocols. We present an algebra of protocols that can be used to compose protocols by refining and merging existing ones, and does this at a level of abstraction high enough to be useful for real-world applications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695-8206, USA

    Ashok U. Mallya & Munindar P. Singh

Authors
  1. Ashok U. Mallya
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  2. Munindar P. Singh
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Correspondence to Munindar P. Singh.

Additional information

We thank Amit Chopra, Nirmit Desai, and anonymous referees for valuable comments. This research was supported partially by the NSF under grant DST-0139037, and partially by DARPA under contract F30603-00-C-0178.

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Mallya, A.U., Singh, M.P. An algebra for commitment protocols. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 14, 143–163 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-006-7232-1

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