Distributed coordination of an agent society based on obligations and commitments to negotiated agreements

Abstract

This chapter discusses coordination from a commitment basis. Typically, commitments are established via a process of negotiation between the parties-the debtor and creditor-involved in the commitment. We define obligations to be those commitments, sometimes termed norms or social commitments, without a clearly identifiable creditor. The establishment of a commitment occurs in response to the adoption of a goal or the acceptance and performance of a task. Using a service-oriented computing (SOC) context, we describe an efficient negotiation process for establishing commitments. We then show how commitments and obligations can be used to monitor and control the aggregate behavior of a group of agents to yield coordinated progress towards the agents' overall objective. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.