Abstract
Agents interact in the context of a society to exchange knowledge, to cooperate and to coordinate their activities. A standard approach is to describe these interactions as conversations specified by means of interaction protocols (IPs). The set of conversations in which an agent can participate defines its communication interface. Therefore, the standardised sets of IPs that specify these conversations can be viewed as Agent Interface Definitions (AID), just as procedure and function definitions make up programming interfaces (API) in other programming paradigms. This paper presents the abstract syntax and semantics of ACSL1: a new formal specification language that can clearly and precisely describe these interfaces so that they can be consumed both by designers and programmers (generally using CASE tools) and automatically by actual agents during interaction. This language fills a gap in the development of agent interface definition languages (AIDL). The paper focuses particularly on the newest features of the language, like (1) protocol composition, (2) protocol exceptions related to the reception of out-of-sequence messages or timeout expirations, (3) compensation protocols that adapt the classical concept of transaction to the autonomy and rationality of agents and, finally, (4) specification of message correlation and causality.
This work is being supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, Project TIC2001-3451.
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
Searle, J. R., Vanderveken, D.: Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England (1985)
ARPA KSI. Specification of the KQML agent-communication language. ARPA Knowledge Sharing Initiative, External Interfaces Working Group (1993)
FIPA-Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents: FIPA ACL Message Structure Specification. http://www..pa.org/specs/.pa00061, FIPA (2002)
Harel, D.: Statecharts: A visual formalism for Complex Systems. Science of Computer Programming, 8:231–274 (1987)
Haddadi, A.: Communication and Cooperation in Agent Systems: A Pragmatic Theory. volume 1056 of LNCS. Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany (1996)
Cost, R. S. et al. Modeling agent conversation with colored Petri Nets. In J. Bradshaw, editor, Autonomous Agents’99, Workshop on Conversation Policies, May(1999)
Turner K. J.: Using Formal Description Techniques. An Introduction to Estelle, LOTOS and SDL. John Wiley and Sons, Ltd (1993)
McBurney, P., Parsons, S., and Wooldridge, M. Desiderata for Agent Argumentation Protocols. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS02), Bologna, Italy, (2002)
Odell J. et al. Representing agent interaction protocols in UML. In P. Ciancarini and M. Wooldridge, editors, Proceedings of Fist International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, Limerick, Ireland, (2000)
FIPA-Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. FIPA Interaction protocol Library Specification. http://www..pa.org/specs/.pa00025, FIPA, (2001)
Fisher, M and Wooldridge, M.: Specifying and Executing Protocols for Cooperative Action. In International Working Conference on Cooperating Knowledge-Based Systems, Keele, 1994
Dignum, F.: FLBC: From Messages to Protocols. In F. Dignum and C. Sierra, editors, European Perspective on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce. Springer Verlag (2000)
Barbuceanu, M and Fox M. S.: COOL: A Language for Describing Coordination in Multiagent System. In ICMAS-95, San Francisco, USA, AAAI Press (1995)
FIPA-Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. FIPA Contract Net Interaction protocol Specification. http://www..pa.org/specs/.pa00025/XC00025E.html, FIPA (2001)
Genesereth, M. and Fikes, R.: Knowledge Exchange Format, version 3.0 reference manual. Technical report, Computer Science Department, Stanford University (1992)
Lynch N.A. et al.: Atomic Transactions. In, N. A. Lynch and A. Fekete, editors, Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Mateo (1994)
Galan, A. and Baker, A.: Multi-agent communications in JAFMAS. In Working Notes of the Workshop on Specifying and Implementing Conversation Policies, Washington (1999)
d’Inverno, M. and Luck, M.: Formalising the Contract Net as a Goal-Directed System. In W.V. de Velde and J. Perram, editors, MAAMAW 96. LNAI 1038. Springer-Verlag (1996)
d’Inverno, M., Kinny, D. and Luck, M.: Interaction Protocols in Agentis. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems ICMAS’98 (1998)
Kuwabara, K. et al.: AgenTalk: Describing multiagent coordination protocols with inheritance. In Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI’95), Herndon, Virginia (1995)
Bradshaw, J.M. et al.: Kaos: Toward an industrial-strength open agent architecture. In Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, editor, Software Agents. AAAI/MIT Press (1997)
Labrou, Y. and Finin, T.: Semantics and conversations for an agent communication language. In Michael Huhns and Munindar Singh, editors, Readings in Agents. Morgan Kaufmann, 1997
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Soriano, J., Alonso, F., López, G. (2003). A Formal Specification Language for Agent Conversations. In: Mařík, V., Pěchouček, M., Müller, J. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems and Applications III. CEEMAS 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2691. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45023-8_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45023-8_21
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-40450-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45023-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive