Specifying and Verifying Compliance in Commitment Protocols

Abstract

Interaction protocols are specific, often standard, constraints on thebehaviors of autonomous agents in a multiagent system. Protocols areessential to the functioning of open systems, such as those that arisein most interesting web applications. A variety of common protocolsin negotiation and electronic commerce are best treated ascommitment protocols, which may be defined and analyzed interms of the creation, satisfaction, or manipulation of thecommitments among the participating agents.When protocols are employed in open environments, such as theInternet, they must be executed by agents that behave more or lessautonomously and whose internal designs are not known. In suchsettings, therefore, there is a risk that the participating agents mayfail to comply with the given protocol. Without a rigorous means toverify compliance, the very idea of protocols for interoperation issubverted. We develop an approach for verifying whether the behavior ofan agent complies with a given commitment protocol. Our approach requiresthe specification of commitment protocols in temporal logic, andinvolves a novel way of synthesizing and applying ideas fromdistributed computing and logics of program.