Abstract
The behavior of e-commerce agents can be defined at different levels of abstraction. A formalism allowing to define them in terms of their economic activities, Utility State Machines, has been proposed. Due to its high level of abstraction, this formalism focuses on describing the economic goals rather on how they are achieved. Though this approach is suitable to specify the objectives of e-commerce agents, as well as to construct formal analysis methodologies, this framework is not suitable to define the strategic behavior of agents. In this paper we develop a new formalism to explicitly define the strategic behavior of agents in a modular way. In particular, we reinterpret the role of utility functions, already used in USMs in a more restrictive manner, so that they define strategic preferences and activities of agents. We apply the formalism to define the agents in a benchmark e-commerce agent environment, the Supply Chain Management Game. Since the strategic behavior of agents is located in a specific part of the formalism, different strategies can be easily considered, which enhances the reusability of the proposed specification.
This research was partially supported by the Spanish MEC projects MASTER/TERMAS TIC2003-07848-C02-01 and WEST/FAST TIN2006-15578-C02-01, the Junta de Castilla-La Mancha project PAC06-0008, the Comunidad de Madrid project to fund research groups CAM-910606,‘ and the Marie Curie project MRTN-CT-2003-505121/TAROT.
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Merayo, M.G., Núñez, M., Rodríguez, I. (2007). Formal Specification of Multi-agent Systems by Using EUSMs. In: Arbab, F., Sirjani, M. (eds) International Symposium on Fundamentals of Software Engineering. FSEN 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4767. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75698-9_21
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