Enforcing agent communication laws by means of a reflective framework

Agent Coordination Contexts (ACCs) have been proposed as virtual environments where agents live and interact. In this way, as in a human society, interactions may be subjected to conventions and laws depending on their context. This is obtained by a suitable ACC that embeds the communication laws relevant to a specific application and checks whether they are fulfilled as interactions take place.Context modelling, while representing a communication aspect relevant for all the agents of an application, is a crosscutting concern with respect to the design of the activities of each agent. In this paper, we propose an approach allowing a separate design and implementation of, respectively, behaviour and the interaction aspects constituting the context. Once the latter have been formalised in a specification consisting of communication laws, a tool generates the necessary management and checking code from the specification.Moreover, we automate the way laws are enforced on agent communication by suitably redirecting any interaction between agents, so as to ensure that the constraints specified by the laws are respected by the interaction, and the actions required by some laws are taken before it actually takes place. Redirection is accomplished by means of computational reflection, which transparently changes the meaning of the communication primitives normally used by agents programmers.

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