A Top Down Approach for Describing the Acquaintace Organisation of Multiagent Systems

Abstract

When the protocol of a complex Multi-Agent System (MAS) needs to be developed, the top-down approach emphasises to start with abstract descriptions that should be refined incrementally until we achieve the detail level necessary to implement it. Unfortunately, there exist a semantic gap in interaction protocol methodologies because most of them first, identify which tasks has to be performed, and then use low level description such as sequences of messages to detail them.

In this paper, we propose an approach to bridge this gap proposing a set of techniques that are integrated in a methodology called MaCMAS (Methodology for Analysing Complex Multiagent Systems). We model MAS protocols using several abstract views of the tasks to be performed, and provide a systematic method to reach message sequences descriptions from task descriptions. These tasks are represented by means of interactions that shall be refined systematically into lower-level interactions with the techniques proposed in this paper (simpler interactions are easier to describe and implement using message passing.) Unfortunately, deadlocks may appear due to protocol design mistakes or due to the refinement process that we present. Thus, we also propose an algorithm to ensure that protocols are deadlock free.