To Commit or Not to Commit: Modeling Agent Conversations for Action

Flores, Roberto A.; Kremer, Rob

doi:10.1111/1467-8640.00186

Cited by 26 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Our approach can handle other operations on commitments, such as delegate and assign. Flores and Kremer (2002) develop a model to specify conversation protocols using conversation policies. They define conversation policies, e.g., always answering a proposal, as norms in the society.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reasoning about Commitments in the Event Calculus: An Approach for Specifying and Executing Protocols

Yolum

Singh

2004

Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence

103

107

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Abstract. Commitments among agents are widely recognized as an important basis for organizing interactions in multiagent systems. We develop an approach for formally representing and reasoning about commitments in the event calculus. We apply and evaluate this approach in the context of protocols, which represent the interactions allowed among communicating agents. Protocols are essential in applications such as electronic commerce where it is necessary to constrain the behaviors of autonomous agents. Traditional approaches, which model protocols merely in terms of action sequences, limit the flexibility of the agents in executing the protocols. By contrast, by formally representing commitments, we can specify the content of the protocols through the agents' commitments to one another. In representing commitments in the event calculus, we formalize commitment operations and domain-independent reasoning rules as axioms to capture the evolution of commitments. We also provide a means to specify protocol-specific axioms through the agents' actions. These axioms enable agents to reason about their actions explicitly to flexibly accommodate the exceptions and opportunities that may arise at run time. This reasoning is implemented using an event calculus planner that helps determine flexible execution paths that respect the given protocol specifications.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reasoning about Commitments in the Event Calculus: An Approach for Specifying and Executing Protocols

Yolum

Singh

2004

Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence

103

107

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Assuming the communicative acts can be observed (as CASA is careful to support), an outside observer can infer social commitments among the observed agents. Our model is formally specified [3,4,5] and forms a clean formal basis on which an observer can decide whether or not a particular agent is fulfilling its social commitments, and therefore has a sound foundation on which to judge agents' behaviour.…”

Section: The Casa Architecturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The curved arrows between the performatives and the social commitment operators in Figure 3 represent some of the policies described in [5] and informally described in Table 2. For example, the P-inform policy associated with the inform perforative would read "if Bob receives a message with an inform performative from Alice, then there exists a social commitment for Bob to send an acknowl- Table 2.…”

Section: Using Commitments With Perfor-mativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Using a performative subsumption lattice to support commitment-based conversations

Kremer

Flores

2005

Proceedings of the Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

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In this paper, we arrange FIPA's ACL performatives to form a subsumption lattice (ontology) and apply a theory of social commitments to achieve a simplified and observable model of agent behaviour. Using this model, it is straight forward to model agents' social commitments (obligations) based solely on observation of messages passed between the agents (such observation is supported by our agent infrastructure system). Furthermore, owing to the performatives being in a subsumption lattice, it is relatively easy for an observer to infer social commitment relationships even if the observer does not understand the details of messages or even the exact performatives used (so long as the observer has access to the performatives ontology).Although social commitment modelling of agent behaviour does not demand that agents are implemented using the social commitment model, our model nonetheless can be used in agent implementation to simplify the specification of agent behaviour through the use of "commitment operators" attached to the performatives (as policies) in the subsumption lattice.The primary contribution of this paper is to show how FIPA's performatives can be mapped onto a theory of social commitment to allow observable social behaviour and conformance to social norms.

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“…We had gained enough knowledge to formalize our theory of agent conversations based on social commitments [5], but the CASA infrastructure itself, although seemingly quite adequate, seemed rather ad-hoc, and lacking in solid theoretical foundation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Performative Type Hierarchy and Other Interesting Considerations in the Design of the CASA Agent Architecture

Kremer

Flores²,

Fournie

2004

Advances in Agent Communication

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In this paper, we describe several interesting design decisions we have taken (with respect to inter-agent messaging) in the reengineered CASA architecture for agent communication and services. CASA is a new architecture designed from the ground up; it is influenced by the major agent architectures such as FIPA, CORBA, and KQML but is intended to be independent (which doesn't imply incompatible). The primary goals are flexibility, extendibility, simplicity, and ease of use. The lessons learned in the earlier implementation have fed the current design of the system. Among the most interesting of the design issues are the use of performatives that form a type lattice, which allows for observers, who do not necessarily understand all the performatives, to nonetheless understand a conversation at an appropriate semantic level. Furthermore, we found it difficult to arrange a portion of the FIPA performatives in a lattice without duplication and complexity. We solved this problem by diverging from FIPA performatives by separating a lot of the performatives into a separate lattice of acts, which work with the performatives, but greatly simplify and enhance the semantic interpretation of the messages. Yet another innovation is the addition of several new fields within a KQML-style message header that allow for further semantic interpretation of the message by an observer who does not necessarily understand the content language. The traditional FIPA fields to, from, sender, and receiver have been extended to include agent (the requester of a service), and actor (the party designated responsible for performing the action specified in the performative/act). These new design considerations add a great deal of flexibility and integrity to an agent communications architecture.

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To Commit or Not to Commit: Modeling Agent Conversations for Action

Cited by 26 publications

References 7 publications

Reasoning about Commitments in the Event Calculus: An Approach for Specifying and Executing Protocols

Reasoning about Commitments in the Event Calculus: An Approach for Specifying and Executing Protocols

Using a performative subsumption lattice to support commitment-based conversations

A Performative Type Hierarchy and Other Interesting Considerations in the Design of the CASA Agent Architecture

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