Engineering agent conversations with the DIALOG framework

Abstract

This paper presents the rationale behind DIALOG: a formal framework for interaction protocol (IP) modeling that considers all the stages of a protocol engineering process, i.e. the design, specification, validation, implementation and management of IPs. DIALOG is organized into three views. The modeling view allows visual IP design. The specification view automatically outputs, from the design, the syntactic specification of the IPs in a declarative-type language called ACSL. This improves IP publication, localization and communication on the Web, as well as IP machine learning by agents. Finally, the implementation view provides a formal structural operational semantics (SOS) for the ACSL language. The paper focuses on the developed SOS, and shows how this semantics allows protocol property verification and eases automatic rule-based code generation from an ACSL specification for the purpose of simulating IP code execution at design time, as well as improving and assuring correct IP compliance at run time. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.