A calculus for MAS interaction protocol

  • Authors:

  • Hongbing Chen;Qun Yang;Manwu Xu

  • Affiliations:

  • State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China;State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China;State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

  • Venue:
  • PRIMA'06 Proceedings of the 9th Pacific Rim international conference on Agent Computing and Multi-Agent Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Formal description and verification of the interaction protocols between agents is a very valuable reserch in development of MAS. In the paper we have defined a calculus for description interaction protocols of MAS based on dialogue. The calculus is founded on process algebra and is designed to be independent of any particular model of rational agency. This makes the verification applicable to heterogeneous agent systems. With the state of session environment and formal semantics of calculus, we can verify some properties of session protocols, e.g. termination, deadlock. Our approach does not suffer from the semantic verification problem because the states of the session dialogue are defined in the protocol itself, and it is straightforward to verify that an agent is or not acting in accordance with the protocol and does not suffer from state-space explosion.