Incorporating Conversation Managers into Multi-agent Systems (original) (raw)

Conversation protocols: Modeling and implementing conversations in agent-based systems

2000

We present Conversation Protocols (CPs) as a methodological way to conceptualize, model, and implement conversations in agent-based systems. CPs can be thought of as coordination patterns that impose a set of rules on the communicative acts uttered by the agents participating in a conversation (what can be said, to whom, and when). Our proposal relies upon interagents, autonomous software agents that mediate the interaction between each agent and the agent society wherein this is situated.

Modelling and visualizing agent conversations

Proceedings of the fifth …, 2001

The notion of conversations, and their associated conversation protocols, as abstract representations to be used to characterise extended agent message exchanges has been discussed in the agent community for several years now. However, there is still no consensus on an appropriate formal specification for these abstractions. This paper describes a proposed formalism based on Petri Nets that is to be used for the modelling of complex, concurrent conversations between agents in a multi-agent system. The approach described in this paper can be used both to define simple conversation protocols and to define protocols for more complex conversations composed of a number of simpler conversations. With this method it is possible (a) to capture the concurrent characteristics of a conversation, (b) to capture the state of a complex conversation during runtime, and (c) to reuse a given conversation structure for processing multiple concurrent messages. It is also possible to monitor a conversation and to visualise, both online and off-line, the progress of a conversation. A prototype implementation of a system supporting predefined conversation protocols as Petri Net models developed for the New Zealand Distributed Information Systems research platform is described.

Evaluation of a Conversation Management Toolkit for Multi Agent Programming

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

The Agent Conversation Reasoning Engine (ACRE) is intended to aid agent developers with the management of conversations to improve the management and reliability of agent communication. To evaluate its effectiveness, a problem was presented to two groups of undergraduate students, one of which was required to create a solution using the features of ACRE and one without. This paper describes the requirements that the evaluation scenario was intended to meet and how these motivated the design of the problem that was presented to the subjects. The solutions were analysed using a combination of simple objective metrics and subjective analysis, which indicated a number of benefits of using ACRE. In particular, subjective analysis suggested that ACRE by defaults prevents some common problems arising that would limit the reliability and extensibility of conversation-handling code.

Coordinating agents using agent communication languages conversations

2001

Internet agents are expected to accomplish their tasks despite heterogeneity; agents of different designs and of varying skills and domain knowledge need to interact successfully through knowledge and information exchange and effective coordination. We identify two distinct and separate problems that Internet agents are faced in an open and dynamic environment: knowledge sharing and coordination.

Engineering issues in inter-agent dialogues

This paper presents a logical framework for modeling of complex dialogues between intelligent and autonomous agents. Our overall approach builds on the assumption that an agent is composed of a set of modules, each of them conveying the appropriate knowledge to carry out a certain dialogue type, such as deliberation, negotiation, persuasion, etc. Much attention has been paid in keeping our framework as operational as possible, in that the architecture of agents and their conversational protocol are thoroughly interrelated. Due to the proposed knowledge structure, set of application-independent rules (called dialogue policies) and the combination of backward and forward reasoning, the framework can generate automatic dialogues between agents.

A review on agent communication language

2019

Agent technology is a new emerging paradigm for software systems. In order to fully utilize the capability of this technology, multiple agents operate in software environment by cooperating, coordinating or negotiating with each other. However, these interactions require these agents to communicate with each other through a common language or protocol. Agent communication language (ACL) is a vital component in multiagent system (MAS) to enable the agents to communicate and exchange messages and knowledge. However, there are no universally agreed agent communication language that is widely adopted. Different agent communication languages and different semantic models have been developed to ease the communication between agents in MAS. The purpose of this paper is to review and highlight advances in the development of ACL.

Investigating Interactions between Agent Conversations and Agent Control Components

Issues in Agent Communication, 2000

Exploring agent conversation in the context of ne-grained agent coordination research has raised several intellectual questions. The major issues pertain to interactions between di erent agent conversations, the representations chosen for di erent classes of conversations, the explicit modeling of interactions between the conversations, and how to address these interactions. This paper is not so ambitious as to attempt to address these questions, only frame them in the context of quanti ed, scheduling-centric multi-agent coordination. research.

Internalising Interaction Protocols as First-Class Programming Elements in Multi Agent Systems

PhD Thesis, 2012

Since their inception, Multi Agent Systems (MASs) have been championed as a solution for the increasing problem of software complexity. Communities of distributed autonomous computing entities that are capable of collaborating, negotiating and acting to solve complex organisational and system manage- ment problems are an attractive proposition. Central to this is the requirement for agents to possess the capability of interacting with one another in a structured, consistent and organised manner. This thesis presents the Agent Conversation Reasoning Engine (ACRE), which constitutes a holistic view of communication management for MASs. ACRE is intended to facilitate the practical development, debugging and deployment of communication-heavy MASs. ACRE has been formally defined in terms of its operational semantics, and a generic architecture has been proposed to facilitate its integration with a wide variety of diverse agent development frameworks and Agent Oriented Programming (AOP) languages. A concrete implementation has also been developed that uses the Agent Factory AOP framework as its base. This allows ACRE to be used with a number of different AOP languages, while providing a reference implementation that other integrations can be modelled upon. A standard is also proposed for the modelling and sharing of agent-focused interaction protocols that is independent of the platform within which a concrete ACRE implementation is run. Finally, a user evaluation illustrates the benefits of incorporating conversation management into agent programming.

Conversation-based specification and composition of agent services

2006

There is great promise in the idea of having agent or web services available on the internet, that can be flexibly composed to achieve more complex services, which can themselves then also be used as components in other contexts. However it is challenging to realise this idea, without essentially programming the composition using some process language such as BPEL4WS or OWLS process descriptions. This paper presents a mechanism for specifying the external interface to composite and component services, and then deriving an appropriate internal model to realise a functioning composition. We present a conversation specification language for defining interaction protocols and investigate the issue of synchronous and asynchronous communication between the composite service and the component services. The algorithm presented computes a valid orchestration of components, given the interface specification of the desired composite service, interface specifications of available components, and some mapping rules between parameters to deal with ontological issues.