Article

Commitments and causality for multiagent design

Authors:

Feng Wan,

Munindar P. SinghAuthors Info & Claims

AAMAS '03: Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems

Pages 749 - 756

https://doi.org/10.1145/860575.860696

Published: 14 July 2003 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

This paper unifies two recent strands of research in multiagent system design. One, commitments are widely recognized as capturing important aspects of interactions among agents, but current approaches tend to emphasize individual commitments and typically restrict themselves to interactions between pairs of agents. Two, methodologies for multiagent system design consider protocols and coordination requirements, but do not seriously accommodate commitments. This paper proposes a methodology to infer commitments from an example conversation among several parties. Based on the conversation, we build a commitment causality diagram indicating the causal relations among the commitments. Using this diagram, we generate behavior models for each role. We show that the models produced successfully capture commitment-level protocols and allow flexible implementation of non-commitment communications provided the causal relations are preserved.

References

[1]

G. Economou, M. Tsvetovat, K. Sycara, and M. Paolucci. Implicit commitments through protocol-level semantics. In Proc. 2nd Workshop on Norms and Institutions in MAS, 2001.

Google Scholar

[2]

N. Fornara and M. Colombetti. Operational specification of a commitment-based agent communication language. In Proc. 1st Intl. Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 535--542, 2002.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

M. N. Huhns, L. M. Stephens, and N. Ivezic. Automating supply-chain management. In Proc. 1st Intl. Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, pp. 1017--1024, 2002.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

S. A. McIlraith, T. C. Son, and H. Zeng. Semantic Web services. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 16(2):46--53, Mar. 2001.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

P. D. O'Brien and M. E. Wiegand. Agent based process management: applying intelligent agents to workflow. Knowledge Engineering Review, 13(2):1--14, 1998.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[6]

J. Odell, H. V. D. Parunak, and B. Bauer. Extending UML for agents. In Proc. Agent Oriented Information Systems Workshop at 17th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2000.

Google Scholar

[7]

H. V. D. Parunak. Visualizing agent conversations: Using enhanced Dooley graphs for agent design and analysis. In Proc. 2nd Intl. Conference on Multiagent Systems, pp. 275--282, 1996.

Google Scholar

[8]

M. P. Singh. An ontology for commitments in multiagent systems: Toward a unification of normative concepts. Artificial Intelligence and Law, 7:97--113, 1999.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[9]

M. P. Singh. A social semantics for agent communication languages. In Proc. 1999 IJCAI Workshop on Agent Communication Languages, LNAI 1916, pp. 31--40, 2000a. Springer-Verlag.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[10]

M. P. Singh. Synthesizing coordination requirements for heterogeneous autonomous agents. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 3(2):107--132, June 2000b.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[11]

M. Verdicchio and M. Colombetti. Commitments for agent-based supply chain management. ACM SIGecom Exchanges, 3(1):13--23, 2002.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[12]

J. Xing, F. Wan, S. K. Rustogi, and M. P. Singh. A commitment-based approach for business process interoperation. IEICE Trans. Information and Systems, E84-D(10):1324--1332, 2001.

Google Scholar

[13]

P. Yolum and M. P. Singh. Commitment machines. In Proc. 8th Intl. Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL-01), pp. 235--247. Springer-Verlag, 2002.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Kalia ASingh M(2015)MuonAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-014-9264-229:4(621-657)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10458-014-9264-2
Barrero DR-Moreno MCamacho D(2012)Adapting Searchy to extract data using evolved wrappersExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2011.08.16839:3(3061-3070)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.eswa.2011.08.168
Serrano EGómez-Sanz JBotía JPavón J(2009)Intelligent data analysis applied to debug complex software systemsNeurocomputing10.1016/j.neucom.2008.10.02572:13-15(2785-2795)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.neucom.2008.10.025
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Commitments and causality for multiagent design
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Distributed artificial intelligence

Recommendations

Constraint satisfaction as a tool for modeling and checking feasibility of multiagent commitments

Commitments are being used to specify interactions among autonomous agents in multiagent systems. Various formalizations of commitments have shown their strength in representing and reasoning on multiagent interactions. These formalizations mostly study ...
Commitment-Based Multiagent Decision Making
CIA '08: Proceedings of the 12th international workshop on Cooperative Information Agents XII

In a cooperative system, multiple dynamic agents work together and share resources to achieve common goals, while simultaneously pursuing their individual goals. Interactions among the agents in such a cooperative system are critical to its successful ...
An ontology for commitments in multiagent systems

Social commitments have long been recognized as an important concept for multiagent systems. We propose a rich formulation of social commitments that motivates an architecture for multiagent systems, which we dub spheres of commitment. We identify the ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

AAMAS '03: Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems

July 2003

1200 pages

ISBN:1581136838

DOI:10.1145/860575

General Chairs:
Jeffrey S. Rosenschein
Israel
,
Michael Wooldridge
UK
,
Program Chairs:
Tuomas Sandholm
USA
,
Makoto Yokoo
Japan

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 July 2003

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

AAMAS03

Sponsor:

AAMAS03: Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

July 14 - 18, 2003

Melbourne, Australia

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,155 of 5,036 submissions, 23%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

10
Total Citations
View Citations
488
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)3
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 11 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Kalia ASingh M(2015)MuonAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-014-9264-229:4(621-657)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10458-014-9264-2
Barrero DR-Moreno MCamacho D(2012)Adapting Searchy to extract data using evolved wrappersExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2011.08.16839:3(3061-3070)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.eswa.2011.08.168
Serrano EGómez-Sanz JBotía JPavón J(2009)Intelligent data analysis applied to debug complex software systemsNeurocomputing10.1016/j.neucom.2008.10.02572:13-15(2785-2795)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.neucom.2008.10.025
Chaib-Draa BLabrie MBergeron MPasquier P(2006)DIAGALAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-006-5961-913:1(61-95)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10458-006-5961-9
Wan FSingh MPechoucek MSteiner DThompson S(2005)Formalizing and achieving multiparty agreements via commitmentsProceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems10.1145/1082473.1082591(770-777)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1082473.1082591
Willmott SPena FMerida-Campos CConstantinescu IDale JCabanillas D(2005)Adapting Agent Communication Languages for Semantic Web Service Inter-CommunicationProceedings of the 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence10.1109/WI.2005.20(405-408)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/WI.2005.20
Wan FSingh M(2005)Enabling Persistent Web Services via CommitmentsInformation Technology and Management10.1007/s10799-004-7774-36:1(41-60)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10799-004-7774-3
Wan FSingh M(2004)Mapping Dooley Graphs and Commitment Causality to the "-CalculusProceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 110.5555/1018409.1018774(412-419)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1018409.1018774
Babczyński TKruczkiewicz ZMagott J(2004)Performance Analysis Of Multiagent Industrial SystemCooperative Information Agents VIII10.1007/978-3-540-30104-2_18(242-256)Online publication date: 2004
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30104-2_18
Wan FSingh M(2004)Analyzing multiparty agreements with commitmentsProceedings of the 6th international conference on Agent-Oriented Information Systems II10.1007/11426714_6(85-96)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/11426714_6

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Constraint satisfaction as a tool for modeling and checking feasibility of multiagent commitments

Commitment-Based Multiagent Decision Making

An ontology for commitments in multiagent systems