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Communciation and Cooperation in Agent Systems:
A Pragmatic Theory

Afsaneh Haddadi

Afsaneh Haddadi, Communciation and Cooperation in Agent Systems: A Pragmatic Theory. Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, No. 1056 Year: 1996 ISBN 3-540-61044-8.

Abstract

Rapid and increasing advances in telecommunications and distributed systems have broadened the arena of possibilites for challenging new applications such as electronic markets, distributed intelligent information services, distributed manufacturing control, cooperative multi-robot applications, and many more. These advances have enabled access to a wide variety of communication networks, offering various means for logically or geographically distributed nodes to connect and communicate. With these possibilities real challenges are converging onto problems requiring better software engineering solutions. As programs are becoming more sophisticated they may collaborate and negotiate with other programs in order to achieve their assigned tasks. To do this they may need to communicate more intelligibly and exhibit sufficient flexibility to build up their dialogues dynamically and interactively. The ability to perform intelligent dialogues is particularly crucial when we have an open system where (heterogeneous) agents ``enter and leave" the system with little or no information about each other's capabilities.

This book presents an approach towards the design of techniques enabling intelligent and flexible dialogues among agents in distributed environments. The approach draws together many ideas on speech acts, cooperation, dialogues and agent architectures, and devises a formal framework to define and specify the major components and the processes involved in reasoning about communication. Based on this framework, the book illustrates how reasoning about communication may be realised in practice. The most important practical benefit of the approach is the concept of ``cooperation protocols'' which provide a mechanism to express various methods of cooperation and structure possible patterns of dialogue in those methods.

The book is useful to many disciplines concerned with intelligent systems and intelligent behaviours. In particular it is intended to benefit those interested in high-level languages and standards for inter-agent communication and flexible dialogues. The incentives for this work, and the literature review material provided in the introductory chapters will be useful to those starting in the field of agent systems and agent theories.

Key topics

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Tuesday, 14-May-1996 19:38:51 EDT