Formal semantics for behavioural substitutability of agent components: Application to interaction protocols

Abstract

This paper presents formal semantics for behavioural substitutability of agent components, and argues that the traditional approaches used in software multi-agent systems are not rigorous and have some limitations. We propose various substitutability relations based upon the preorder relations which are considered in the study of concurrent systems. Examples of interaction protocols such as the Contract-Net-Protocol are given to illustrate our approach.