Modeling Lateral Communication in Holonic Multi Agent Systems

Agents, in a multi agent system, communicate with each other through the process of exchanging messages which is called dialogue. Multi agent organization is generally used to optimize agents’ communications. Holonic organization demonstrates a self-similar recursive and hierarchical structure in which each holon may include some other holons. In a holonic system, lateral communication occurs between members of a determined holon and vertical communications are inter-level ones between different holons. When agents start a dialogue, according to their beliefs, they follow some rules that define the permissive speech acts called dialogue protocol. The dialogue strategy is the policy of agents to choose a particular speech act among the allowed ones by the protocol in order to achieve the common goals of holon. In this paper a formal model for dialogue strategy for lateral communication in a holon is proposed. This model tries to choose the most preferable speech acts considering at the same time local beliefs and goals along with public knowledge obtained from holonic organization. Moreover, the argumentation theory is applied to rank and define the values of speech acts. The proposed model finds the most preferable option to utter and it also decreases the number of exchanging messages. The proposed model of dialogue strategy is illustrated via a deliberation dialogue example in a holon. The example showed a significant efficiency in decreasing the number of exchanged messages and the effectiveness of deliberation.