Three approaches to the coordination of multiagent systems
Proceedings of the 2002 ACM symposium on Applied computing
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Interaction protocols are specific, often standard, constraints on the behaviors of the autonomous agents in a multiagent system. Protocols are essential to the functioning of open systems, such as those that arise in most interesting web applications. A variety of common protocols in negotiation and electronic commerce are best treated as commitment protocols} which are defined, or at least analyzed, in terms of the creation, satisfaction, or manipulation of the commitments of the various agents to one another. When protocols are employed in open environments, such as the Internet, they must be executed by agents that behave more or less autonomously and whose internal designs are not known. In such settings, therefore, there is a risk that the participating agents may fail to comply with the protocol. Without a rigorous means to verify compliance, the very idea of protocols for interoperation is subverted. We develop a novel approach for testing the compliance of agents with respect to a commitment protocol. Our approach requires the specification of commitment protocols in temporal logic, and involves a novel way of synthesizing and applying ideas from distributed computing and logics of program.