Goal-Oriented Interaction Protocols

Developing agent applications is a complex and difficult task due to a variety of reasons. One key aspect making multi-agent systems more complicated than traditional applications is that interaction behavior is based on elaborate communication forms such as negotiations instead of simple method calls. Aimed at facilitating the specification and usage of agent communication, agent research resulted e.g. in the definition and standardization of several general purpose interaction protocols such as contract-net or English auction. Nevertheless, the usage of these valuable interaction patterns currently forces developers to concentrate on the details of message passing instead of thinking in terms of the application domain. To alleviate this problem in this paper a goal-oriented approach is proposed, which hides message passing details allowing developers to concentrate on the domain aspects of protocols. The new approach is based on the BDI agent model and is implemented within the Jadex agent framework. The advantages of the goal-based interaction handling are further illustrated by an example application.