Programming Multiagent Systems without Programming Agents

Singh, Munindar P.; Chopra, Amit K.

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-14843-9_1

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Indeed, the system may be specified independently of the agents [37]. The system itself serves as the specification, from a global perspective, of the legitimate expectations that agents adopting roles in the system would have of each other.…”

Section: Multiagent Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Requirements as Goals and Commitments Too

Chopra

Mylopoulos

Dalpiaz

et al. 2010

Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering

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In traditional software engineering research and practice, requirements are classified either as functional or non-functional. Functional requirements consist of all functions the system-to-be ought to support, and have been modeled in terms of box-and-arrow diagrams in the spirit of SADT. Non-functional requirements include desired software qualities for the system-to-be and have been described either in natural language or in terms of metrics. This orthodoxy was challenged in the mid-90s by a host of proposals that had a common theme: all requirements are initially stakeholder goals and ought to be elicited, modeled and analyzed as such. Through systematic processes, these goals can be refined into specifications of functions the system-to-be needs to deliver, while actions assigned to external actors need to be executed. This view is dominating Requirements Engineering (RE) research and is beginning to have an impact on RE practice. We propose a next step along this line of research, by adopting the concept of conditional commitment as companion concept to that of goal. Goals are intentional entities that capture the needs and wants of stakeholders. Commitments, on the other hand, are social concepts that define the willingness and capability of an actor A to fulfill a predicate ϕ for the benefit of actor B, provided B (in return) fulfills predicate ψ for the benefit of actor A. In our conceptualization, goals are mapped to collections of commitments rather than functions, qualities, or actor assignments. We motivate the importance of the concept of commitment for RE through examples and discussion. We also contrast our proposal with state-of-theart requirements modeling and analysis frameworks, such as KAOS, MAP, i* and Tropos.

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Section: Multiagent Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Requirements as Goals and Commitments Too

Chopra

Mylopoulos

Dalpiaz

et al. 2010

Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering

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“…More precisely, such actions capture the dynamic behavior of committing agents, provide a principle way to evolve the changes in the social commitment states, and define the life cycle of commitments.As social commitments have been introduced in agent communication research, they have become a well-acknowledged engineering tool to formally model and reason upon the interaction among agents (Yolum & Singh, 2002b, 2004). Furthermore, they have been successfully applied to other research areas such as modeling business processes (Desai et al , 2005; Telang & Singh, 2009a, 2012), developing artificial institutions (Fornara et al , 2008), defining programming languages (Winikoff, 2007; Singh & Chopra, 2010), modeling service-oriented computing (Singh et al , 2009), enhancing agent-oriented software engineering methodologies (El-Menshawy et al , 2009a; Telang & Singh, 2009b), developing Web-based MASs (Venkatraman & Singh, 1999), developing agent-based Web services and their communities (Bentahar et al , 2008; El-Menshawy et al , 2009a), specifying commitment-based protocols (Yolum & Singh, 2002b, 2004; Desai et al , 2007; Mallya & Singh, 2007; Baldoni et al , 2010), specifying business protocols (Desai et al , 2005; El-Menshawy et al , 2010a), checking commitment conflicts (Günay &Yolum, 2013), and diagnosing exceptions (Kafali & Torroni, 2012). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Computational logics and verification techniques of multi-agent commitments: survey

Menshawy¹,

Kholy²,

Yolum

et al. 2015

The Knowledge Engineering Review

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Agent communication languages (ACLs) are fundamental mechanisms that enable agents in multi-agent systems totalk, communicate with each other in order to satisfy their individual and social goals in a cooperative and competitive manner. Social approaches are advocated to overcome the shortcomings of ACL semantics delineated by using mental approaches in the figure of agents’ mental notions. Over the last two decades,socialcommitments have been the subject of considerable research in some of those social approaches as they provide a powerful representation for modeling and reasoning upon multi-agent interactions in the form of mutual contractual obligations. They particularly provide a declarative, flexible, verifiable, and social semantics for ACL messages while respecting agents’ autonomy, heterogeneity, and openness.In this manuscript, we go through prominent and predominate proposals in the literature to explore the state of the art on how temporal logics can be devoted to define a formal semantics for ACL messages in terms of social commitments and associated actions. We explain each proposal and point out if and how it meetssevencrucial criteria, four of them introduced by Munindar P. Singh to have a well-defined semantics for ACL messages. Far from deciding the best proposal, our aim is to present the advantages (strengths) and limitations of those proposals to designers and developers using a concrete running example and to compare between them, so that they can make the best choice with regard to their needs. We explore and evaluate current specification languages and different verification techniques that have been discussed within those proposals to, respectively, specify and verify commitment-based protocols. We also investigate logical languages of actions advocated to specify, model, and execute commitment-based protocols in other contributed proposals. Finally, we suggest some solutions that can contribute to address the identified limitations.

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Hybrid Intelligent Multi-agent System for Power Restoration

Listopad

2020

Communications in Computer and Information Science

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Programming Multiagent Systems without Programming Agents

Cited by 6 publications

References 12 publications

Requirements as Goals and Commitments Too

Requirements as Goals and Commitments Too

Computational logics and verification techniques of multi-agent commitments: survey

Hybrid Intelligent Multi-agent System for Power Restoration

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