Open Protocol Design for Complex Interactions in Multi-agent Systems

摘要

This paper proposes a generic approach for protocol engineering through the analysis, the specification, and the verification of such protocols when several agents are involved. This approach is three folds: 1) Starting from semi-formal specification by means of Protocol Diagrams (AUML), both formal specification of interaction protocols and their verification are allowed thanks to Colored Petri Nets (CPN); 2) Debugging and qualitative analysis of interactions are based on distributed observation associated with the true concurrency semantics (i.e. CPN unfolding) and ; 3) CPN formalism is extended to Recursive CPN (RCPN) with abstraction in order to deal with open protocols. The main interest of abstraction is the design of flexible protocols giving agents more autonomy during interaction. In addition, abstraction allows concise modeling and easier verification.