Agent interaction management and application in a virtual collaborative environment

The intention of managing agent interactions between agents residing in a virtual collaborative environment is to obtain some useful beliefs that can be used in agent reasoning and decision making in order to optimize further agent interactions. Agent business relationships (such as trust, loyalty, understanding and friendship) are such beliefs. This research provides an approach to the management and application of agent interaction instances. The paper firstly introduces the multi-agent system architecture built in the virtual collaborative environment. Secondly, it presents the interaction protocols designed for the software agents. Then, it describes the design and implementation of the management of interactions. Finally, it depicts a specific belief revision function for personal agents to dynamically update agent business relationships in terms of the management of agent interaction instances. © 2005 by International Federation for Information Processing