We present a model of cooperative problem solving that describes the process from its beginning, with some agent recognising the potential for cooperation with respect to one of its goals, through to team action. Our approach is to characterise the mental states of the agents that leads them to solicit, and take part in, cooperative action. The model is formalised by expressing it as a theory in a quantified multi-modal logic.

Conversation protocols are used to achieve certain goals or to bring about certain states in the world. Therefore, one may identify the landmarks or the states that must be brought about during the goal-directed execution of a protocol. Accordingly, the landmarks, characterized by propositions that are true in the state represented by that landmark, are the most important aspect of a protocol. Families of conversation protocols can be expressed formally as partially ordered landmarks after the landmarks necessary to achieve a goal have been identified. Concrete protocols represented as joint action expressions can, then, be derived from the partially ordered landmarks and executed directly by joint intention interpreters. This approach of applying Joint Intention theory to protocols also supports flexibility in the actions used to get to landmarks, shortcutting protocol execution, automatic exception handling, and correctness criterion for protocols and protocol compositions. 1.

. As agents move into ever more important applications, there is a natural growth in interest in techniques for synthesizing multiagent systems. We describe an approach for engineering the coordination requirements of a multiagent system based on an analysis of conversation instances extracted from usage scenarios. This approach exploits the notion of Dooley graphs that were recently introduced to the multiagent systems community from the linguistics and discourse analysis literature. We show how, with a few key modifications, Dooley graphs can be used to generate coordination requirements and constraints on the behavior models of the agents participating in a multiagent system. Our present approach is embodied in the context of our recent work on a distributed coordination service for heterogeneous, autonomous agents. This approach takes as input (a) agent skeletons, giving compact descriptions of the given agents in terms of their events that are significant for coordination, as wel...

Workflows are ubiquitous in business computing. They arise not only within an enterprise, but increasingly across enterprises as well---in situations such as virtual enterprises and applications such as supply-chain management. Although the importance of workflows as a basis for understanding and automating business activities is widely recognized, current workflow practice leaves much to be desired. To a large extent, this problem arises because of the rigidity of current technology, which does not accord well with the complex, heterogeneous, dynamic environments in which workflows are applied. Agent technology promises to alleviate many of these problems and hence enable adaptive workflows in realistic settings. We consider interaction-oriented programming (IOP), an approach to software engineering based on multiagent systems that we have been developing. We focus on one aspect of IOP, which deals with social commitments and enables agents to flexibly enact a multienterprise workflow by entering into and behaving according to their commitments to each other. The agents can cancel or modify their base-level commitments only if they satisfy the metacommitments that then go into effect.

the semantics of an agent communication language has become increasingly important as agent technology makes its transition from the research laboratory to eld-tested applications. In this paper, we show how model checking techniques can be applied to this problem. Model checking is a technique developed within the formal methods community for automatically verifying that nite-state concurrent systems implement temporal logic speci cations. We rst describe a variation of the MABLE multiagent bdi programming language, which permits the semantics (pre- and postconditions) of acl performatives to be de ned separately from a system where these semantics are used. We then show how assertions de ning compliance to the semantics of an acl can be captured as claims about MABLE agents, expressed using MABLE's associated assertion language. In this way, compliance to acl semantics reduces to a conventional model checking problem. We illustrate our approach with a number of short case studies.

Tandem focuses on prospective concepts in order to deal with speciøc problems of mixed patrols, i.e. aerial patrols composed of both inhabited and uninhabited aircraft. Cooperation between humans and artiøcial devices, so as the dioeerent possible modes of interactions have to be modelled and assessed. The paper decribes the concepts that will be developed to tackle the problems, so as the methodology that will be implemented to assess them. L'#tude Tandem s'int#resse # des concepts avanc#s en vue de traiter les probl#mes sp#- ciøques des patrouilles mixtes, c'est-#-dire de dispositifs a#riens compos#s d'avions habit#s et d'avions inhabit#s. La coop#ration entre personnes et syst#mes artiøciels, ainsi que les dioe#rents modes d'interaction possibles, doivent #tre mod#lis#s et #valu#s. L'article d#crit les concepts qui seront d#velopp #s, ainsi que la m#thodologie qui sera mise en #uvre pour les #valuer. 1 Introduction The tactical environment of øghters is more and more hostile and i...

Tandem focuses on prospective concepts in order to deal with specic problems of mixed patrols, i.e. aerial patrols composed of both inhabited and uninhabited aircraft. Cooperation between humans and articial devices, so as the dioeerent possible modes of interactions have to be modelled and assessed. The paper decribes the concepts that will be developed to tackle the problems, so as the methodology that will be implemented to assess them. L'#tude Tandem s'int#resse # des concepts avanc#s en vue de traiter les probl#mes sp#- ciques des patrouilles mixtes, c'est-#-dire de dispositifs a#riens compos#s d'avions habit#s et d'avions inhabit#s. La coop#ration entre personnes et syst#mes articiels, ainsi que les dioe#rents modes d'interaction possibles, doivent #tre mod#lis#s et #valu#s. L'article d#crit les concepts qui seront d#velopp #s, ainsi que la m#thodologie qui sera mise en #uvre pour les #valuer. 1 Introduction The tactical environment of ghters is more and mo...

1school of industrial and systems engineering