Understanding Cooperation: An Agent's Perspective

The Multi-agent Environment for Constructing Cooperatlve Applications (NECCA) ia based upon a framework unifying the internal behavior of agents and cooperation among agents. This paper presents a formalized view of agent behavior relying on the basic loop of goal activation, plan execution and scheduli~ followed by task execution. This allows for a presentation of the semantics of cooperation primitives: interagent messages supporting cooperation, comprised of speech acts operating upon objects occuring in the basic loop. The formal semantics of cooperation primitives gives a meaning to il~lividua] messages, independent from the cooperation protocol. Thus, agents can reason about exchana~e~ messages and are able to dynamically create their own methods for cooperation.