2COMM: A Commitment-Based MAS Architecture

Social expectations and social dependencies are a key characteristic of interaction, which should be explicitly accounted for by the agent platform, supporting the coordination of the involved autonomous peers. To this aim, it is necessary to provide a normative characterization of coordination and give a social meaning to the agents’ actions. We focus on one of the best-known agent platforms, Jade, and show that it is possible to account for the social layer of interaction by exploiting commitment-based protocols, by modifying the Jade Methodology so as to include the new features in a seamless way, and by relying on the notion of artifact, along the direction outlined in the Mercurio proposal.