Constitutive and regulative specifications of commitment protocols

Abstract

Interaction protocols play a fundamental role in multiagent systems. In this work, after analyzing the trends that are emerging not only from research on multiagent interaction protocols but also from neighboring fields, like research on workflows and business processes, we propose a novel definition of commitment-based interaction protocols, that is characterized by the decoupling of the constitutive and the regulative specifications and that explicitly foresees a representation of the latter based on constraints among commitments. A clear distinction between the two representations has many advantages, mainly residing in a greater openness of multiagent systems, and an easier reuse of protocols and of action definitions. A language, named 2CL, for writing regulative specifications is also given together with a designer-oriented graphical notation.