Detecting Conflicts in Commitments

Commitments are being used widely to specify interaction among autonomous agents in multiagent systems. While various formalizations for commitments and its life cycle exist, there has been little work that studies commitments in relation to each other. However, in many situations, the content and state of one commitment may render another commitment useless or even worse create conflicts. This paper studies commitments in relation to each other. Following and extending an earlier formalization by Chesani et al., we identify key conflict relations among commitments. The conflict detection can be used to detect violation of commitments before the actual violation occurs during agent interaction (run-time) and this knowledge can be used to guide an agent to avoid the violation. It can also be used during creation of multiagent contracts to identify conflicts in the contracts (compile-time). We implement our method in REC and present a case study to demonstrate the benefit of our method.