Logic-Based Agent Communication Protocols

Abstract

Abstract. An agent communication protocol specifies the rules of interaction governing a dialogue between agents in a multiagent system. In non-cooperative interactions (such as negotiation dialogues) occurring in open societies, the problem of checking an agent's conformance to such a protocol is a central issue. We identify different levels of conformance (weak, exhaustive, and robust conformance) and explore, for a specific class of logic-based agents and an appropriate class of protocols, how to check an agent's conformance to a protocol a priori, purely on the basis of the agent's specification.

Verifying Protocol Conformance for Logic-Based Communicating Agents

“…The problem of checking the agent conformance to a protocol in a logical framework has been faced also in [12]. In [12] agent communication strategies and protocol specification are both represented by means of sets of if-then rules in a logic-based language, which relies on abductive logic programming.…”

“…In [12] agent communication strategies and protocol specification are both represented by means of sets of if-then rules in a logic-based language, which relies on abductive logic programming. A notion of weak conformance is introduced, which allows to check if the possible moves that an agent can make, according to a given communication strategy, are legal w.r.t.…”

“…However, our approach allows to tackle a broader class of protocols: we are not restricted to protocols that sequentially alternate the dialogue moves of the agents. Furthermore, while in [12] conformance avoids to deal with the dialogue history, our notion of conformance takes into account the whole context of the conversation, due to the fact that it considers sequences of dialogue acts. This can be done thanks to the modal logic framework, which allows to naturally deal with contexts.…”

A Computational Model for Conversation Policies for Agent Communication

“…These protocols must be flexible enough and must also be specified using a more expressive formalism than traditional formalisms such as finite state machines. Indeed, logic-based protocols seem an interesting way [15].…”

Verification of Protocol Conformance and Agent Interoperability

“…the requirements, derived from the analysis phase, that it should embody. In the literature validation has often been tackled by means of model checking techniques [7,6,22], and two kinds of conformance verifications have been studied: a priori conformance verification, and run-time conformance verification (or compliance) [9,10,15]. If we call a conversation a specific interaction between two agents, consisting only of communicative acts, the first kind of conformance is a property of the implementation as a whole -intuitively it checks if an agent will never produce conversations that violate the abstract interaction protocol specification-while the latter is a property of the on-going conversation, aimed at verifying if that conversation is legal.…”