A Unification and Delegation Approach to Configure Generic Protocols for Agent Interactions

Coordination mechanisms are needed whenever software entities in a complex system have to act together for the performance of a collaborative task. We focus on a particular form of coordination mechanism, generic protocols, which are interaction patterns without any application domain information. In addition to their re-usability, generic protocols are the most suitable mechanisms to describe interactions in complex, open and heterogeneous systems. However, before they can be used, such coordination mechanisms need to be extended with the actual application domain information. This extension, called protocol configuration, is usually manually performed by designers, thus introducing potential inconsistencies at run time. These inconsistencies are even hard to anticipate and solve. In the past, we developed a static automatic protocol configuration by introducing information related to the functionalities agents achieve in the system. However, in open, heterogeneous and dynamically evolving systems, agents might be involved in the performance of collaborative tasks whose suitable protocols have not been configured into their model. We fix this limitation by developing a dynamic protocol configuration approach, which adds on top the static one a mechanism to delegate the functionalities which lack in an agent´s model. In this paper, we present the delegation mechanism.