A logic based approach to interaction design in open multi-agent systems

An important challenge posed by the design of open information systems concerns the choice of suitable methods to harness their complexity and to guarantee the correctness of their behaviour. In recent times, logic programming has been proposed as a powerful technology, formal and declarative, for the specification and verification of agent based and open systems. In this work, we focus on the interaction design. We base our approach on a logic-based formalism, which can be used to define the semantics of agent communication languages and interaction protocols. We advocate its use within a more general framework, drawing a design methodology which encompasses the specification of the interaction space and of its desired properties, and their verification.