Reasoning about agents and protocols via goals and commitments

Abstract

This paper seeks to combine two largely independent threads of multiagent systems research---agent specification and protocols. We specify agents in terms of goal models (as used in Tropos). We specify protocols in terms of the commitments among agents. We illustrate and formalize the semantic relationship between agents and protocols by exploiting the relationship between goals and commitments. Given an agent specification and a protocol, the semantics helps us perform two kinds of verification: (1) whether the protocol supports achieving particular agent goals, and (2) whether the agent's specification supports the satisfaction of particular commitments.