Protocol Engineering for Multi-agent Interaction

This paper focuses on the study of the pragmatics of multi-agent systems design, proposing an efficient approach for the interaction protocol engineering. This approach combines two complementary paradigms: 1) Distributed observation is used to capture the concurrent events inherent to the interactions between agents, through causal dependency, in order to explain the relationships within conversations or group utterances; 2) Colored Petri Nets are used as a suitable formalism to identify interaction-oriented designs while providing the means to model, analyze, and validate large scale applications.