Coordinating Agents in Organizations Using Social Commitments

One of the main challenges faced by the multi-agent community is to ensure the coordination of autonomous agents in open heterogeneous multi-agent systems. In order to coordinate their behaviour, the agents should be able to interact with each other. Social commitments have been used in recent years as an answer to the challenges of enabling heterogeneous agents to communicate and interact successfully. However, coordinating agents only by means of interaction models is difficult in open multi-agent systems, where possibly malevolent agents can enter at any time and violate the interaction rules. Agent organizations, institutions and normative systems have been used to control the way agents interact and behave. In this paper we try to bring together the two models of coordinating agents: commitment-based interaction and organizations. To this aim we describe how one can use social commitments to represent the expected behaviour of an agent playing a role in an organization. We thus make a first step towards a unified model of coordination in multi-agent systems: a definition of the expected behaviour of an agent using social commitments in both organizational and non-organizational contexts.

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