Commitment protocol generation

Abstract

Multiagent systems contain agents that interact with each other to carry out their activities. The agents' interactions are usually regulated with protocols that are assumed to be defined by designers at design time. However, in many settings, such protocols may not exist or the available protocols may not fit the needs of the agents. In such cases, agents need to generate a protocol on the fly. Accordingly, this paper proposes a method that can be used by an agent to generate commitment protocols to interact with other agents. The generation algorithm considers the agent's own goals and capabilities as well as its beliefs about other agents' goals and capabilities. This enables generation of commitments that are more likely to be accepted by other agents. We demonstrate the workings of the algorithm on a case study. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.