Multi-agent system interaction protocols in a dynamically changing environment

An area where multi-agent systems can be put to effective use is for the case of an open collection of autonomous problem solvers in a dynamically changing environment. One example of such a situation is that of environmental management and emergency response, which can require the joint cooperation of a distributed set of components, each one of which may be specialised for a specific task or problem domain. The various stakeholders in the process can all be represented and interfaced by software agents which collaborate with each other toward achieving a particular goal. For such situations new agents that arrive on the scene must be apprised of the group interaction protocols so that they can cooperate effectively with the existing agents. In this paper we show how this can be done by using coloured Petri net representations for each role in an interaction protocol and passing these nets dynamically to new agents that wish to participate in a group interaction. We argue that multi-agent systems are particularly suited for such dynamically changing environments, but their effectiveness depends on the their ability to use adaptive interaction protocols.UnpublishedCost, S., Chen, Y., Finin, T., Labrou, Y., and Peng, Y., “Using colored Petri nets for conversation modeling, Issues in Agent Communication, Lecture Notes in AI, Springer-Verlag, Berlin (2000). R. Elio and A. Haddadi. On abstract task models and conversation policies. In Working Notes of the Workshop on Specifying and Implementing Conversation Policies, pages 89-98, May 1999. FIPA. Foundation For Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA). FIPA 2001 specifications, http://www.fipa.org/specifications/, 2001. Greaves, M, and Bradshaw, J. (eds.), Specifying and Implementing Conversation Policies, Autonomous Agents '99 Workshop, Seattle, W A, (May 1999). Grubȩr, T. R., “A Translation Approach to Portable Ontologies”, Knowledge Acquisition, (1993) 5(2):199-220. Jennings, N. R., “Agent-oriented software engineering”, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications of AI, (1999). Jensen, K., Coloured Petri Nets – Basic Concepts, Analysis Methods and Practical Use, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1992. Nowostawski, M., JFern, version 1.2.1, http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=16338, 2002. Nowostawski, M., Purvis, M., and Cranefield, S., “A Layered Approach for Modelling Agent Conversations”, Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Infrastructure for Agents, MAS, and Scalable, MAS, 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents (2001) 163-170. Odell, J, Parunak, H. V. D., Bauer, B., “Extending UML for agents”, Proceedings of the Agent-Oriented Information Systems Workshop at the 17th National conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 3-17, 2000. Parker Brothers, Inc., Salem, Mass., 1919. see http://www.centralconnector.com/GAMES/pit.html. Parunak. H. V. D., “Visualizing agent conversations: Using Enhanced Dooley graphs for agent design and analysis”, Proceedings of the Second International conference on Multi-Agent Systems ICMAS'96 (1996). Purvis, M., Cranefield, S., Nowostawski, M., and Carter, D., "Opal: A Multi-Level Infrastructure for Agent-Oriented Software Development", Information Science Discussion Paper Series, No. 2002/01, ISSN 1172-6024, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, http://www.otago.ac.nz/informationscience/publctns/complete/papers/dp2002-01.pdf.gz, (2002)