Matching Conflicts: Functional Validation of Agents

Abstract : In most working and proposed multi-agent systems, the problem of identifying and locating agents that can provide specific services is a major problem of concern. A broker or matchmaker service is often proposed as a solution. These systems use keywords drawn from application domain ontologies to specify agent services, usually framed within some sort of knowledge representation language. However, the authors believe that keywords and ontologies cannot be defined and interpreted precisely enough to make brokering or matchmaking among agents sufficiently robust in a truly distributed, heterogeneous, multi-agent computing environment. This creates matching conflicts between a client agent's requested functionality and a service agent's actual functionality. They propose a new form of interagent communication, called functional validation, which is specifically designed to solve such matching conflicts. In this paper, they introduce the functional validation concept, analyze the possible situations that can arise in validation problems, and formalize the mathematical framework around which further work can be done.