Engineering Multiagent Systems Based on Interaction Protocols: A Compositional Petri Net Approach
Sea Ling, Seng W. Loke · Kluwer Academic Publishers eBooks · 2006
Multiagent systems are useful in distributed systems where autonomous and flexible behaviour with decentralized control is advantageous or necessary. To facilitate agent interactions in multiagent systems, a set of interaction protocols for agents has been proposed by the Foundation of Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA). These protocols are specified diagramatically in an extension of UML called AUML (Agent UML) for agent communication. In this paper, we informally present a means to translate these protocols to equivalent Petri net specifications. Our Petri nets are compositional, and we contend that compositionality is useful since multiagent systems and their interactions are inherently modular, and so that mission-critical parts of a system can be analysed separately.