Current languages for specifying multiagent protocols either over-constrain protocol enactments or complicate capturing their meanings. We propose Langshaw, a declarative protocol language based on (1) sayso, a new construct that captures who has priority over setting each attribute, and (2) nono and nogo, two constructs to capture conflicts between actions. Langshaw combines flexibility with an information model to express meaning. We give a formal semantics for Langshaw, procedures for determining the safety and liveness of a protocol, and a method to generate a message-oriented protocol (embedding needed coordination) suitable for flexible asynchronous enactment.
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Tango: Declarative Semantics for Multiagent Communication Protocols
A flexible communication protocol is necessary to build a decentralized multiagent system whose member agents are not coupled to each other's decision making.Information-based protocol languages capture a protocol in terms of causality and integrity constraints based on the information exchanged by the agents. Thus, they enable highly flexible enactments in which the agents proceed asynchronously and messages may be arbitrarily reordered. However, the existing semantics for such languages can produce a large number of protocol enactments, which makes verification of a protocol property intractable.This paper formulates a protocol semantics declaratively via inference rules that determine when a message emission or reception becomes enabled during an enactment, and its effect on the local state of an agent.The semantics enables heuristics for determining when alternative extensions of a current enactment would be equivalent, thereby helping produce parsimonious models and yielding improved protocol verification methods.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1908374
- PAR ID:
- 10293714
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 30th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 391 to 397
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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