Abstract
Despite the fact that social computation systems involve interaction mechanisms that closely resemble well-known models of agent coordination, current applications in this area make little or no use of the techniques the agent-based systems literature has to offer. In order to bridge this gap, this paper proposes a data-driven method for defining and deploying agent interaction protocols that is entirely based on using the standard architecture of the World Wide Web. This obviates the need of bespoke message passing mechanisms and agent platforms, thereby facilitating the use of agent coordination principles in standard Web-based applications. We describe a prototypical implementation of the architecture and experimental results that prove it can deliver the scalability and robustness required of modern social computation applications while maintaining the expressiveness and versatility of agent interaction protocols.
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Notes
- 1.
Different types \(D_j\) can be used here to accommodate different types of variables. These are omitted for simplicity.
- 2.
Throughout the paper, we adopt the convention of referring to elements in a structure \(x=\langle y, y',\ldots \rangle \) as y(x), \(y'(x)\) etc.
- 3.
Allowing many senders in messages may seem counter-intuitive at first, but is useful for situations where a physical sender acts on behalf of a whole group, or to summarise identical messages received from various peers as one message in the data-driven model we introduce in Sect. 4.
- 4.
Note that different semantics are possible here, which may assume that senders also have a modified state regarding their perception of receivers’ local variables after sending a message, or receivers inferring facts about senders’ previous states upon receipt of a message. Which of these variants is chosen is not essential for the material provided below.
- 5.
The superscript (k) is added to the succ function here to indicate that op requires this number of timesteps.
- 6.
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Acknowledgments
The research presented in this paper has been funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement n. 600854 “SmartSociety – Hybrid and Diversity-Aware Collective Adaptive Systems: Where people meet machines to build smarter societies” (http://www.smart-society-project.eu/).
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Rovatsos, M., Diochnos, D., Craciun, M. (2015). Agent Protocols for Social Computation. In: Koch, F., Guttmann, C., Busquets, D. (eds) Advances in Social Computing and Multiagent Systems. MFSC 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 541. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24804-2_7
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