GoCo: planning expressive commitment protocols

Acknowledgements We gratefully thank those who shared their code with us. Special thanks to Ugur Kuter. We thank the anonymous reviewers, and also acknowledge with gratitude the reviewers at ProMAS’11, AAMAS’13, AAAI’13, and AAMAS’15, where preliminary parts of this work appeared. FM thanks the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) for the support within process numbers 306864/2013-4 under the PQ fellowship and 482156/2013-9 under the Universal project programs. NYS acknowledges support of the AUB University Research Board Grant Number 102853 and the OSB Grant OFFER_C1_2013_2014.Peer reviewe

A first-order formalization of commitments and goals for planning

Commitments help model interactions in multiagent systems in a computationally realizable yet high-level manner without compromising the autonomy and heterogeneity of the member agents. Recent work shows how to combine commitments with goals and apply planning methods to enable agents to determine their actions. However, previous approaches to modeling commitments are confined to propositional representations, which limits their applicability in practical cases. We propose a first-order representation and reasoning technique that accommodates templatic commitments and goals that may be applied repeatedly with differing bindings for domain objects. Doing so not only leads to a more perspicuous modeling, but also supports many practical patterns

Protos: A Cross-Organizational Business Modeling Tool (Demonstration)

Traditional approaches to cross-organizational business modeling use low-level abstractions such as data and control flow. These approaches result in rigid models that over-constrain business execution. Further, because such approaches ignore the underlying business relationships that drive process execution, they lack the notion of business level correctness. Telang and Singh [5] propose a high-level business modeling approach based upon (social) commitments to address these shortcomings. The high-level model captures the business relationships in terms of commitments between the participants. Telang and Singh [5] develop a method for verifying if a low-level interaction model satisfies a high-level business model. They propose a top-down methodology in which a Business analyst first develops a high-level business model. An IT analyst then develops UML 2.0 sequence diagrams, and verifies if they satisfy the high-level model. Protos is an Eclipse-based tool that implements Telang and Singh’s [5] methodology. It enables: (a) the development of a high-level business model using reusable patterns, (b) the development of UML 2.0 sequence diagrams, as a low-level operational representation, and (c) the automated verification of the UML 2.0 sequence diagrams with respect to the high-level business model

Maintenance commitments: Conception, semantics, and coherence

Social commitments are recognized as an abstraction that enables flexible coordination between autonomous agents. We make these contributions. First, we introduce and formalize a concept of a maintenance commitment, a kind of social commitment characterized by a maintenance condition whose truthhood an agent commits to maintain. This concept of maintenance commitments enables us to capture a richer variety of real-world scenarios than possible using achievement commitments with a temporal condition. Second, we develop a rule-based operational semantics, by which we study the relationship between agents' achievement and maintenance goals, achievement commitments, and maintenance commitments. Third, we motivate a notion of coherence between an agents' achievement and maintenance cognitive and social constructs, and prove that, under specified conditions, the goals and commitments of both rational agents individually and of a multiagent system altogether are coherent. Fourth, we illustrate our approach with a detailed real-world scenario from an aerospace aftermarket domain.Algorithmic