We present the JaCaMo+ framework for programming multiagent systems (MAS), where agents interact thanks to commitment-based interaction protocols. Commitment protocols are realized as artifacts that maintain a social state and notify to the participating agents those events that are relevant to the interaction. We discuss the advantages, like increased modularity and flexibility, that are brought by commitment-ruled interactions with respect to other proposals. We trace back such advantages to the possibility of relying on a standardized commitment lifecycle. We explain how to use the framework to program interacting agents by using the Netbill protocol as running example, and the Gold Miners scenario as a more complex programming example.
Enterprises must respect a number of regulations, with multilevel nature and which change along time. They must not only adapt their business interactions to the regulations and their changes but also evaluate the risks of violation of the new rules and to account for responsibilities. This work proposes a methodological framework for modeling and engineering business protocols, which gives primary position to the notions of commitment and responsibility, and supports the analysis of risks of violation when a new regulation is issued. We build on 2CL commitment-based protocols and introduce 2CL Methodology, a software engineering methodology for such protocols, which includes guidelines for specifying 2CL business protocols, for specialising them, and for composing a new 2CL protocol based on a set of given 2CL protocols. We developed a set of integrated software tools for the design and the analysis of 2CL protocols, with the aim of concretely supporting, on the one hand, designers in the task of identifying exposure to risks of violation, and, on the other hand, the management in the task of reasoning about accountability and of decision making. The proposal is evaluated by using a real-world case study from the banking sector.Keywords Commitment-based business protocols, regulations, methodologies, risks of violations, accountability IntroductionBusiness protocols are a means for specifying the interaction of a set of autonomous parties with heterogeneous software designs and implementations. They have a normative value in that parties are expected to behave according to the protocol. In many practical settings, the reality in which such parties operate is characterized by a high degree of regulation, and the business relationships are increasingly constrained by the regulative and legislative framework. This is, for instance, the case of banking and of trading services.As new regulations are issued, there is the need of adapting business protocols to the new dictates, which usually restrict -e.g. by adding new commitments and new constraints -the possible interactions or require the combination of different protocols. Think, for instance,
Socio-Technical Systems demand an evolution of computing into social computing, with a transition from an individualistic to a societal view. As such, they seem particularly suitable to realize multi-party, crossorganizational systems. Multi-Agent Systems are a natural candidate to realize Socio-Technical Systems. However, while Socio-Technical Systems envisage an explicit layer that contains the regulations that all parties must respect in their interaction, and thus preserve the agents' autonomy, current frameworks and platforms require to hard-code the coordination requirements inside the agents. We propose to explicitly represent the missing layer of Socio-Technical Systems in terms of social relationships among the involved parties, i.e. in terms of a set of normatively defined relationships among two or more parties, subject to social control by monitoring the observable behaviour. In our proposal, social relationships are resources, available to agents, who use them in their practical reasoning. Both agents and social relationships are first-class entities of the model. The work also describes 2COMM4JADE, a framework that realizes the proposal by extending the well-known JADE and CArtAgO. The impact of the approach on programming is explained both conceptually and with the help of an example.
Abstract. This work proposes an operational semantics for the commitment protocol language 2CL. This semantics relies on an extension of Singh's Generalized Commitment Machine, that we named 2CL-Generalized Commitment Machines. The 2CL-Generalized Commitment Machine was implemented in Prolog by extending Winikoff, Liu and Harland's implementation. The implementation is equipped with a graphical tool that allows the analyst to explore all the possible executions, showing both commitment and constraint violations, and thus helping the analyst as well as the protocol designer to identify the risks the interaction could encounter. The implementation is part of an Eclipse plug-in which supports 2CL-protocol design and analysis.
Abstract-Social expectations and social dependencies are a key characteristic of interaction, which should be explicitly accounted for by the agent platform, supporting the coordination of the involved autonomous peers. To this aim, it is necessary to provide a normative characterization of coordination and give a social meaning to the agents' actions. We focus on one of the best-known agent platforms, Jade, and show that it is possible to account for the social layer of interaction by exploiting commitment-based protocols, by modifying the Jade Methodology so as to include the new features in a seamless way, and by relying on the notion of artifact, along the direction outlined in the Mercurio proposal. This is a light revision of a paper presented a EMAS 2013.
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