Commitments Among Autonomous Agents in Information-Rich Environments

Commitments are crucial to understanding and designing autonomous agents and multiagent systems. We propose a deenition of commitments that applies especially well to agents in information-rich applications, such as electronic commerce and virtual enterprises. Our approach has a number of important features, including { not gratuitously translating social concepts to psychological concepts { distinguishing between satissed and inapplicable commitments { incorporating social policies to handle the creation, satisfaction, and cancelation of commitments { relating commitments to organizational structure in a multiagent system { showing how commitments are acquired by agents as a consequence of adopting a role.