Abstract
Protocols enable unambiguous and smooth interactions among agents, and commitments among agents are a powerful means of developing protocols. Commitments allow 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 that employ commitment-based interaction 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 interaction protocols that can capture the needs of different applications. We show how a commitment-based semantics for protocols 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.
We thank Amit Chopra and Nirmit Desai for valuable comments. This research was supported by the NSF under grant DST-0139037.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
BPEL. Business process execution language for web services, version 1.1 (May 2003), http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-bpel
Bussmann, S., Jennings, N.R., Wooldridge, M.: Re-use of interaction protocols for agent-based control applications. In: Giunchiglia, F., Odell, J.J., Weiss, G. (eds.) AOSE 2002. LNCS, vol. 2585, pp. 73–87. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Castelfranchi, C.: Commitments: From individual intentions to groups and organizations. In: Proceedings of the AAAI 1993 Workshop on AI and Theories of Groups and Organizations: Conceptual and Empirical Research (1993)
Chopra, A., Singh, M.P.: Nonmonotonic commitment machines. In: Huget, M.-P., Dignum, F. (eds.) Proceedings of the AAMAS 2003 Workshop on Agent Communication Languages and Conversation Policies (2003)
Fischer, L. (ed.): The Workflow Handbook 2004, Future Strategies Inc., Lighthouse Point, FL, Compendium of standards and articles by the Workflow Management Coalition, WfMC (2004)
Fornara, N., Colombetti, M.: Defining interaction protocols using a commitment-based agent communication language. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), July 2003, pp. 520–527. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Fu, X., Bultan, T., Su, J.: Realizability of conversation protocols with message contents. In: Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on Web Services, pp. 96–105. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2004)
Grosof, B.N., Poon, T.C.: SweetDeal: Representing agent contracts with exceptions using XML rules, ontologies, and process descriptions. In: Proceedings 12th International Conference on the World Wide Web, pp. 340–349 (2003)
Hamadi, R., Benatallah, B.: Proceedings of the 14th Australasian Database Conference. In: Zhou, X., Schewe, K.-D. (eds.) ADC, Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology, February 2003, vol. 17, pp. 191–200. Australian Computer Society (2003)
Johnson, M.W., McBurney, P., Parsons, S.: When are two protocols the same? In: Huget, M.-P. (ed.) Communication in Multiagent Systems. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2650, pp. 253–268. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Malone, T.W., Crowston, K., Herman, G.A. (eds.): Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook. MIT Press, Cambridge (2003)
Peltz, C.: Web service orchestration and choreography. IEEE Computer 36(10), 46–52 (2003)
Pitt, J., Mamdani, A.: Communication protocols in multi-agent systems. In: Dignum, F.P.M., Greaves, M. (eds.) Issues in Agent Communication. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 1916, pp. 160–177. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., Camarillo, G., Johnston, A., Peterson, J., Sparks, R., Handley, M., Schooler, E.: SIP: Session initiation protocol. IETF Proposed Standard. Available as an RFC at, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3261.txt
Singh, M.P.: An ontology for commitments in multiagent systems: Toward a unification of normative concepts. Artificial Intelligence and Law 7, 97–113 (1999)
Singh, M.P., Chopra, A.K., Desai, N.V., Mallya, A.U.: Protocols for processes: Programming in the large for open systems. In: Onward! at the 19th ACM Conference on Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (2004)
Sirbu, M.A.: Credits and debits on the Internet. IEEE Spectrum 34(2), 23–29 (1997)
van der Aalst, W., Desel, J., Oberwis, A. (eds.): Business Process Management: Models, Techniques, and Empirical Studies. LNCS, vol. 1806. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
van der Aalst, W., van Hee, K. (eds.): Workflow Management Models, Methods, and Systems. MIT Press, Cambridge (2002)
Verdicchio, M., Colombetti, M.: Commitments for agent-based supply chain management. ACM SIGecom Exchanges 3(1), 13–23 (2002)
Vitteau, B., Huget, M.-P.: Modularity in interaction protocols. In: Dignum, F.P.M. (ed.) ACL 2003. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2922, pp. 291–309. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Yolum, P., Singh, M.P.: Flexible protocol specification and execution: Applying event calculus planning using commitments. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS), July 2002, pp. 527–534. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mallya, A.U., Singh, M.P. (2005). A Semantic Approach for Designing Commitment Protocols. In: van Eijk, R.M., Huget, MP., Dignum, F. (eds) Agent Communication. AC 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3396. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32258-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32258-0_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25015-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32258-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)