Composing and verifying commitment-based multiagent protocols

We consider the design and enactment of multiagent protocols that describe collaboration using "normative" or "social" abstractions, specifically, commitments. A (multiagent) protocol defines the relevant social states and how they progress; each participant maintains a local projection of these states and acts accordingly. Protocols expose two important challenges: (1) how to compose them in a way that respects commitments and (2) how to verify the compliance of the parties with the social states. Individually, these challenges are inadequately studied and together not at all. We motivate the notion of a social context to capture how a protocol may be enacted. A protocol can be verifiably enacted when its participants can determine each other's compliance. We first show the negative result that even when protocols can be verifiably enacted in respective social contexts, their composition cannot be verifiably enacted in the composition of those social contexts. We next show how to expand such a protocol so that it can be verifiably enacted. Our approach involves design rules to specify composite protocols so they would be verifiably enactable. Our approach demonstrates a use of dialectical commitments, which have previously been overlooked in the protocols literature

Specification and Verification of Commitment-Regulated Data-Aware Multiagent Systems

In this paper we investigate multi agent systems whose agent interaction is based on social commitments that evolve over time, in presence of (possibly incomplete) data. In particular, we are interested in modeling and verifying how data maintained by the agents impact on the dynamics of such systems, and on the evolution of their commitments. This requires to lift the commitment-related conditions studied in the literature, which are typically based on propositional logics, to a first-order setting. To this purpose, we propose a rich framework for modeling data-aware commitment-based multiagent systems. In this framework, we study verification of rich temporal properties, establishing its decidability under the condition of “state-boundedness”, i.e., data items come from an infinite domain but, at every time point, each agent can store only a bounded number of them

Towards an Agent-Based Approach for Multimarket Package e-Procurement

While most e-commerce research focuses on one market based problems, less work has been done on multimarket aggregation. Nowadays it is important to address the multimarket package e-procurement problem if we want to acquire a combination of goods and services from different suppliers and service providers. To achieve this, one should address the issues pertaining to identifying of a company's needs, discovering potential partners and suppliers, gathering distributed information and conducting combined negotiations, creating a seamless of information flow with different heterogeneous markets, suppliers, and partners, and finally concluding transactions. Several commercial e-procurement applications already automate some aspects of the procurement processes, helping decision makers and employees complete their purchasing activity. But none take into account the key aspects of combining goods and services into one aggregated package. Agent-based systems are well equipped to address the challenges of multimarket package e-procurement. Indeed, goal driven autonomous agents aim to satisfy user requirements and preferences while being flexible enough to deal with the diversity of semantics amongst markets, suppliers, service providers, partners and individual sellers. A distributed common shared space, called infospace, comprised of the negotiation exchanges and states, allows for agent coordination, market aggregation, and packages construction. This paper presents some issues and challenges faced in multimarket package e-procurement, and puts forward an agent-based approach to deal with them. La plupart des recherches sur le commerce électronique s'intéressent aux problèmes reliés à des marchés uniques. Moins de travaux ont été réalisés autour de l'approvisionnement multimarché. Le problème d'approvisionnement électronique (e-procurement) multimarché d'un paquet consiste en l'acquisition d'une combinaison d'objets à partir de différents fournisseurs de biens et services. Afin d'y parvenir, nous devons identifier les besoins de l'entreprise, découvrir les fournisseurs et partenaires potentiels, extraire de l'information distribuée et eventuellement gérer des négociations combinées, gérer le flux d'information circulant entre des marchés hétérogènes, vendeurs et partenaires, et finalement conclure des transactions. Il existe un certain nombre d'applications commerciales d'approvisionnement électronique qui automatisent quelques aspects du processus d'approvisionnement pour les entreprises, en aidant les preneurs de décisions et les employés dans leurs activités d'achats et d'approvisionnement. Mais aucune de ces applications ne tient en compte l'aspect de combinaison d'objets en un paquet agrégé. Les systèmes à base d'agents représentent une approche adéquate pour faire face aux problématiques posées de l'approvisionnement électronique multimarché d'un paquet. En effet, les agents autonomes essayent de satisfaire les besoins et préférences de l'utilisateur en étant assez flexibles pour gérer la diversité sémantique entre marchés, vendeurs, et fournisseurs de services. Un espace commun et partagé, appelé InfoSpace, contenant les échanges de données et les états des négociations, assure la coordination des agents, l'agrégation des marchés et la construction des paquets. Ce papier présente quelques problématiques et défis reliés à l'approvisionnement électronique multimarché de paquets, et expose une approche basée sur les agents pour y faire face.Markets, e-Procurement, Combined Negotiations, Multi-agent Systems, Marchés, e-procurement, négociations combinées, systèmes à base d'agents

Towards a satisfactory conversion of messages among agent-based information systems

Over the last years, there has been a change of perspective concerning the management of information systems, since they are no longer isolated and need to communicate with others. However, from a semantic point of view, real communication is difficult to achieve due to the heterogeneity of the systems. We present a proposal which, considering information systems are represented by software agents, provides a framework that favors a semantic communication among them, overcoming the heterogeneity of their agent communication languages. The main components of the framework are a suite of ontologies – conceptualizing communication acts – that will be used for generating the communication conversion, and an Event Calculus interpretation of the communications, which will be used for formalizing the notion of a satisfactory conversion. Moreover, we present a motivating example in order to complete the explanation of the whole picture.The work of Idoia Berges was supported by a grant of the Basque Government (Programa de Formación de Investigadores del Departamento de Educación, Universidades e Investigación). This work is also supported the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science TIN2010–21387-C02–01