On Enactability of Agent Interaction Protocols: Towards a Unified Approach

Interactions between agents are usually designed from a global viewpoint. However, the implementation of a multi-agent interaction is distributed. This difference can introduce problems. For instance, it is possible to specify protocols from a global viewpoint that cannot be implemented as a collection of individual agents. This leads naturally to the question of whether a given (global) protocol is enactable. We consider this question in a powerful setting (trace expressions), considering a range of message ordering interpretations (specifying what it means to say that an interaction step occurs before another), and a range of possible constraints on the semantics of message delivery, corresponding to different properties of the underlying communication middleware.