urn : nbn : de : 0074 - 799

The proposal of Elisa Marengo’s thesis is to extend commitment protocols to explicitly account for temporal regulations. This extension will satisfy two needs: (1) it will allow representing, in a flexible and modular way, temporal regulations with a normative force, posed on the interaction, so as to represent conventions, laws and suchlike; (2) it will allow committing to complex conditions, which describe not only what will be achieved but to some extent also how. These two aspects will be deeply investigated in the proposal of a unified framework, which is part of the ongoing work and will be included in the thesis. 1 Commitment-based Interaction Protocols The issues of communication and cooperation are crucial in the area of Multiagent systems (MAS). The common solution is to rely on agent interaction protocols. Among different proposals, commitment protocols [24] have been widely adopted. All agents, involved in an interaction ruled by a commitment protocol, share the semantics of a set of actions which affect the social state. This semantics is based on the notion of social commitment. The idea is that if an agent takes a commitment towards another agent to bring about a condition, then, it will behave in such a way to fulfill the engagement sooner or later. In this respect, commitment protocols have a deontic nature, because a commitment introduces a social expectation on the responsibility of some agent towards some other agent to perform something or to achieve some result. Commitment protocols suit well open MAS because they are respectful of the agents’ autonomy, since no introspection to the agents’ mental states is required [26]; they are dynamic because commitments can be created, released, deleted and suchlike, and flexible because agents are free to take advantage of opportunities or to follow shortcuts [29]. Commitment protocols have fundamentally changed the process of protocol specification from a procedural approach (i.e., prescribing how an interaction is to be executed) to a declarative one (i.e., describing what interaction is to take place) [28]. Agents decide which action to perform depending on the commitments they have taken and this is because they want to comply with the protocol and fulfill the engagements they have taken [28]. However, in many practical situations this is not sufficient. Why? Because, in many cases it is necessary to express some hints on how the interaction should evolve [7,18]. For example, it is necessary to express that some ways to fulfill the commitments M. Baldoni and C. Baroglio are the advisor and co-advisor.