Making and Breaking Engagements: An Operational Analysis of Agent Relationships

Fundamental to the operation of multi-agent systems is the concept of cooperation between individual agents by which the overall system exhibits signiicantly greater functionality than the individual components. Not only is it important to understand the structure of such relationships in multi-agent systems, it is also important to understand the ways in which cooperative relationships come about. This is particularly true if such an analysis is to be relevant to, and useful for, the construction of real systems for which the invocation and destruction of such relationships is critical. This paper extends previous work concerned with formalising the structure of inter-agent relationships to provide an operational analysis of the invocation and destruction of engagement and cooperation within our formal agent framework.