Committment-Based Data-Aware Multi-Agent-Contexts Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces DACmMCMAS, a novel multi-agent system framework that integrates commitment-based communication with external heterogeneous information sources, extending previous models to include external context acquisition.

Contribution

It proposes DACmMCMAS, combining commitment-based multi-agent systems with external context interaction, maintaining formal properties of prior models.

Findings

DACmMCMAS can interact with external heterogeneous information sources.

The formal properties of original commitment-based systems are preserved.

The approach extends the capabilities of multi-agent systems to external contexts.

Abstract

Communication and interaction among agents have been the subject of extensive investigation since many years. Commitment-based communication, where communicating agents are seen as a debtor agent who is committed to a creditor agent to bring about something (possibly under some conditions) is now very well-established. The approach of DACMAS (Data-Aware Commitment-based MAS) lifts commitment-related approaches proposed in the literature from a propositional to a first-order setting via the adoption the DRL-Lite Description Logic. Notably, DACMASs provide, beyond commitments, simple forms of inter-agent event-based communication. Yet, the aspect is missing of making a MAS able to acquire knowledge from contexts which are not agents and which are external to the MAS. This topic is coped with in Managed MCSs (Managed Multi-Context Systems), where however exchanges are among knowledge bases and not agents. In this paper, we propose the new approach of DACmMCMASs (Data-Aware Commitment-based managed Multi- Context MAS), so as to obtain a commitment-based first-order agent system which is able to interact with heterogeneous external information sources. We show that DACmMCMASs retain the nice formal properties of the original approaches.