Flexible protocol specification and execution

TLDR

Protocols define the permissible interactions among communicating agents and are essential in domains such as electronic commerce, yet traditional action‑sequence models restrict agent flexibility. The authors propose a protocol specification method that captures action content through mutual commitments between agents. They formalize commitments within a variant of the event calculus, provide operations and reasoning rules to track commitment evolution, and use an event‑calculus planner to generate flexible execution paths that honor the protocol specifications.

Abstract

Protocols represent the allowed interactions among communicating agents. Protocols are essential in applications such as electronic commerce where it is necessary to constrain the behaviors of autonomous agents. Traditional approaches, which model protocols in terms of action sequences, limit the flexibility of the agents in executing the protocols. By contrast, we develop an approach for specifying protocols in which we capture the content of the actions through agents' commitments to one another. We formalize commitments in a variant of the event calculus. We provide operations and reasoning rules to capture the evolution of commitments through the agents' actions. Using these rules in addition to the basic event calculus axioms enables agents to reason about their actions explicitly to flexibly accommodate the exceptions and opportunities that arise at run time. This reasoning is implemented using an event calculus planner that helps us determine flexible execution paths that respect the protocol specifications.