Abstract
An interaction protocol captures the rules of encounter in a multiagent system. Development of agents that comply with protocols is a central challenge of multiagent systems. Our contribution in this chapter is a programming model, Stellar, that simplifies development of agents compliant with information protocols specified in BSPL. A significant distinction of Stellar from similar approaches is that it does not rely upon extracting control flow structures from protocol specifications to ensure compliance. Instead, Stellar provides a set of fundamental operations to programmers for producing viable messages according to the correct flow of information between agents as specified by a protocol, enabling flexible design and implementation of protocol-compliant agents. Our main contributions are: (1) identification of a set of programming errors that commonly occur when developing agents for protocol-based multiagent system, (2) definition of Stellar’s operations and a simple yet effective pattern to develop protocol-compliant agents that avoid the identified errors, and (3) demonstration of Stellar’s effectiveness by presenting concrete agents in e-commerce and insurance policy domains.
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Notes
- 1.
Stellar is available on https://github.com/akingunay/stellar.
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Acknowledgments
Munindar P. Singh and Thomas C. King gave valuable suggestions that helped improve this chapter. Akın Günay and Amit Chopra were supported by the EPSRC grant EP/N027965/1 (Turtles).
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Günay, A., Chopra, A.K. (2019). Stellar: A Programming Model for Developing Protocol-Compliant Agents. In: Weyns, D., Mascardi, V., Ricci, A. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11375. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25693-7_7
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