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Commitment Machines

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Intelligent Agents VIII (ATAL 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2333))

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Abstract

We develop an approach in which we model communication protocols via commitment machines. Commitment machines supply a content to protocol states and actions in terms of the social commitments of the participants. The content can be reasoned about by the agents thereby enabling flexible execution of the given protocol. We provide reasoning rules to capture the evolution of commitments through the agents’ actions. Because of its representation of content and its operational rules, a commitment machine effectively encodes a systematically enhanced version of the original protocol, which allows the original sequences of actions as well as other legal moves to accommodate exceptions and opportunities. We show how a commitment machine can be compiled into a finite state machine for efficient execution, and prove soundness and completeness of our compilation procedure.

We would like to thank James Lester and Peter Wurman for helpful comments. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant IIS-9624425 (Career Award). A preliminary version of this paper appears in the WET ICE 2000 Proceedings.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695-7535, USA

    Pınar Yolum & Munindar P. Singh

Authors
  1. Pınar Yolum
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  2. Munindar P. Singh
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information and Computing Sciences Intelligent Systems Group, Utrecht University, Padualaan 14 De Uithof, 3508 TB, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    John-Jules Ch. Meyer

  2. Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Henry Salvatori Computer Center 232, Los Angeles, CA, 90089-0781, USA

    Milind Tambe

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Yolum, P., Singh, M.P. (2002). Commitment Machines. In: Meyer, JJ.C., Tambe, M. (eds) Intelligent Agents VIII. ATAL 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2333. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45448-9_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45448-9_17

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-43858-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45448-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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