in this paper we describe a method which allows agents to dynamically select protocols and roles when they need to execute collaborative tasks
Protocols selection in agents interactions design is something generally done at design time. Indeed, most of the agent-oriented design methodologies ( @cite_3 and @cite_4 to quote a few) all make designers decide which role agents should play for each single interaction. However dynamic behaviours and openness in MAS demand greater flexibility.
@cite_4 @cite_3
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With the ever growing usage of the world wide IT networks, agent technologies and multiagent systems (MAS) are attracting more and more attention. Multiagent systems are designed to be open systems, wheras agent technologies aim at the design of agents that perform well in environments that are not necessarily well-structured and benevolent. Emergent system behaviour is one of the most interesting phenomena one can investigate in MAS. However, there is more to MAS design than the interaction between a number of agents. For an effective system behaviour we need structure and organisation. This paper presents basic concepts of a theory for holonic multiagent systems with the aim to define the building blocks of a theory that can explain organisation and dynamic reorganisation in MAS. In doing so it tries to bridge the well-known micro-macro gap in MAS theories. The basic concepts are illustrated with three application scenarios: flexible manufacturing, order dispatching in haulage companies, and train coupling and sharing. Despite all the research done in the last years on the development of methodologies for designing MAS, there is no methodology suitable for the specification and design of MAS in complex domains where both the agent view and the organizational view can be modeled. Current multiagent approaches either take a centralist, static approach to organizational design or take an emergent view in which agent interactions are not pre-determined, thus making it impossible to make any predictions on the behavior of the whole systems. Most of them also lack a model of the norms in the environment that should rule the (emergent) behavior of the agent society as a whole and or the actions of individuals. In this paper, we propose a framework for modeling agent organizations, Organizational Model for Normative Institutions (OMNI), that allows the balance of global organizational requirements with the autonomy of individual agents. It specifies global goals of the system independently from those of the specific agents that populate the system. Both the norms that regulate interaction between agents, as well as the contextual meaning of those interactions are important aspects when specifying the organizational structure. This article presents Gaia: a methodology for agent-oriented analysis and design. The Gaia methodology is both general, in that it is applicable to a wide range of multi-agent systems, and comprehensive, in that it deals with both the macro-level (societ al) and the micro-level (agent) aspects of systems. Gaia is founded on the view of a multi-agent system as a computational organisation consisting of various interacting roles. We illustrate Gaia through a case study (an agent-based business process management system). Global session types are behavioral types designed for specifying in a compact way multiparty interactions between distributed components, and verifying their correctness. We take advantage of the fact that global session types can be naturally represented as cyclic Prolog terms - which are directly supported by the Jason implementation of AgentSpeak - to allow simple automatic generation of self-monitoring MASs: given a global session type specifying an interaction protocol, and the implementation of a MAS where agents are expected to be compliant with it, we define a procedure for automatically deriving a self-monitoring MAS. Such a generated MAS ensures that agents conform to the protocol at run-time, by adding a monitor agent that checks that the ongoing conversation is correct w.r.t. the global session type.