Interaction protocol

Abstract: The architecture of a multi-agent system can naturally be viewed as a computational organisation. For this reason, we believe organisational abstractions should play a central role in the analysis and design of such systems. To this end, the concepts of agent roles and role models are increasingly being used to specify and design multi-agent systems. However, this is not the full picture. In this paper we introduce three additional organisational concepts--organisational rules, organisational structures, and organisational patterns--that we believe are necessary for the complete specification of computational organisations.We view the introduction of these concepts as a step towards a comprehensive methodology for agent-oriented systems.

Abstract: This paper describes the development of a distributed multi-agent workflow enactment mechanism using the BPEL4WS[1] specification. It demonstrates that a multi-agent protocol (Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC)[8]) can be used to interpret a BPEL4WS specification to enable distributed business workflow[5] using web services[2] composition on the multi-agent platform. The key difference between our system and other existing multi-agent based web services composition systems is that with our approach, a business process model(system requirement) can be adopted directly in the multi-agent system, thus reduce the effort on the validation and verification of the interaction protocol (system specification). This approach also provides us with a lightweight way of re-design of large component based systems.

Abstract: A general purpose application interaction protocol, referred to herein as the Commerce Exchange Interaction Protocol (CXIP), governs the exchange of data between applications resident in computers in a distributed network such as the Internet, providing for application interoperability CXIP enables process communications among network-distributed software applications, particularly, but not exclusively, among software applications having dissimilar platforms, language dependencies or vendor dependencies Data structures, object and method invocation requests are exchanged between applications by means of XML documents based on CXIP semantics The application interaction protocol, which is not specific to any particular functional domain and specifies interactions that are independent of transactional content, includes four component parts: message formats, message types, exchange semantics and transportation assumptions CXIP-based interactions use TCP/IP as their underlying transport mechanism, although CXIP may be implemented using SMTP or FTP, or on top of any other standard application-layer protocol, including HTTP

Abstract: Complex networked systems abound in Nature and Technology. They consist of a multitude of interacting agents communicating with each other over a web of complex interconnections. Flocks of birds, platoon of cooperating robots, swirling fishes in the Ocean are all examples whose intricate dynamics can be modeled in terms of three essential ingredients: (i) a mathematical description of the dynamical behavior of each of the agents in the network; (ii) an interaction (or coupling) protocol used by agents to communicate with each other and (iii) a graph describing the network of interconnections between neighboring agents. These three elements are actually mapped onto the mathematical model usually considered in the literature to describe a complex network which uses appropriate equations to describe the node dynamics, the coupling protocol and the network topology.