An organisational approach to the design of interaction protocols

Abstract

Modern ACLs, such as FIPA ACL, provide standardised catalogues of performatives and protocols, designed as general purpose languages to ensure interoperability among agent systems. However, recent work reports a need for new ad-hoc sets of performatives and protocols in certain contexts, showing that FIPA ACL does not support adequately all relevant types of interactions. In this paper we first present a formal model that relates performatives and protocols, to the organisation of MAS. Then, the FIPA IPL is analysed from the perspective of this formal model and a principled method for the design of the IPL of a particular MAS is developed, which account for both, reusability and expressiveness. Finally, we illustrate our approach by an example in the domain of online stock brokering. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.