Abstract
Commitments are a powerful representation for modeling multiagent interactions. Previous approaches have considered the semantics of commitments and how to check compliance with them. However, these approaches do not capture some of the subtleties that arise in real-life applications, e.g., e-commerce, where contracts and institutions have implicit temporal references. The present paper develops a rich representation for the temporal content of commitments. This enables us to capture realistic contracts and institutions rigorously, and avoid subtle ambiguities. Consequently, this approach enables us to reason about whether and when exactly a commitment is satisfied or breached and whether it is or ever becomes unenforceable.
We thank the anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions that helped improve the text. We also thank Mario Verdicchio and Marco Colombetti for their comments. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant DST-0139037.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Yolum, P., Singh, M.P.: Flexible protocol specification and execution: Applying event calculus planning using commitments. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS), ACM Press, New York (2002)
Fornara, N., Colombetti, M.: Operational specification of a commitment-based agent communication language. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, pp. 535–542. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Venkatraman, M., Singh, M.P.: Verifying compliance with commitment protocols: Enabling open Web-based multiagent systems. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2, 217–236 (1999)
Partee, B.: Nominal and temporal anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy 7, 287–324 (1984)
Emerson, E.A.: Temporal and modal logic. In: van Leeuwen, J. (ed.) Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, vol. B, pp. 995–1072. North-Holland, Amsterdam (1990)
Castelfranchi, C.: Commitments: From individual intentions to groups and organizations. In: Proceedings of the AAAI-1993 Workshop on AI and Theories of Groups and Organizations: Conceptual and Empirical Research (1993)
Singh, M.P.: An ontology for commitments in multiagent systems: Toward a unification of normative concepts. Artificial Intelligence and Law 7, 97–113 (1999)
Allen, J.F.: Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals. Communications of the ACM 26, 832–843 (1983)
Dignum, F., Weigand, H., Verharen, E.: Meeting the deadline: On the formal specification of temporal deontic constraints. In: Michalewicz, M., Raś, Z.W. (eds.) ISMIS 1996. LNCS, vol. 1079, pp. 243–252. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)
Grosof, B.N., Labrou, Y., Chan, H.Y.: A declarative approach to business rules in contracts: Courteous logic programs in XML. In: Wellman, M.P. (ed.) Proceedings 1st Annual ACM Conf. on Electronic Commerce, EC 1999, Denver, CO, USA, November 3-5, ACM Press, New York (1999)
OASIS: Business transaction protocol (2002), www.oasis-open.org/committees/businesstransactions/documents/specification/2002-06-03.BTPctteespec1.0.pdf
Dalal, S., Temel, S., Little, M., Potts, M., Webber, J.: Coordinating business transactions on the web. IEEE Internet Computing 7, 30–39 (2003)
Verdicchio, M., Colombetti, M.: A logical model of social commitment for agent communication. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS), ACM Press, New York (2003)
McBurney, P., Parsons, S.: Posit spaces: A performative model of e-commerce. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (2003) (to appear)
Singh, M.P.: Multiagent systems as spheres of commitment. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS) Workshop on Norms, Obligations, and Conventions (1996)
Giunchiglia, E., Lee, J., McCain, N., Lifschitz, V., Turner, H.: Nonmonotonic causal theories. Artificial Intelligence, AIJ (2003) (to appear)
Chopra, A., Singh, M.: Nonmonotonic commitment machines. In: Dignum, F.P.M. (ed.) ACL 2003. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2922, pp. 183–200. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mallya, A.U., Yolum, P., Singh, M.P. (2004). Resolving Commitments among Autonomous Agents. In: Dignum, F. (eds) Advances in Agent Communication. ACL 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2922. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24608-4_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24608-4_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20769-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-24608-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive