Commitment-based Protocols with Behavioral Rules and Correctness Properties of MAS

Commitment-based interaction protocols are a flexible way of representing the interaction of a set of agents, that is well-known and widely accepted by the research community. Normally these protocols consist of sets of actions with a shared meaning. From the point of view of an agent, however, the meaning of an action is completed by the context in which it is used: the context shapes the behavior of the agent in that the agent decides which actions to take depending on it. Indeed, since the seminal work of Searle (supported by other authors), two components of interaction protocols have been identified, constitutive rules and regulative rules, which altogether define the meaning of the interaction. Commitment-based protocols usually do not account for the latter. In this work we introduce a representation that explicitly includes regulative rules as constraints on commitments and, in the light of the work by Singh and Chopra [36], report the first steps in the analysis of the advantages brought by such introduction.