Towards Planning Uncertain Commitment Protocols

In the context of a business process modeled by commitments, agents enact a protocol by carrying out goals that service their part of commitments. In a competitive or even in a cooperative setting, an agent does not know for sure that its partners will successfully act on their part of the commitments. We introduce uncertainty into a successful recent approach of planning first-order commitment protocols. Probabilities reflect a semantics of the belief of an agent about the successful completion of tasks by other agents within the protocol, capturing notions of trust. We take a deterministic Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planner, introduce probabilities into the task networks, and derive a protocol enactment which maximizes expected utility from the point of view of one agent. We illustrate our approach on a business scenario in e-commerce.