Specifying and Verifying Compliance in Commitment Protocols

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.

Author dc:creator

• Venkatraman, Mahadevan

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Dr. Munindar P. Singh, Chair
• Dr. Kuo-chung Tai, Member
• Dr. Injong Rhee, Member

Statement dc:rights

• I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to NC State University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

Dc Identifier Other

etd-19990708-120623

OAI record oai:identifier

https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Arepository.lib.ncsu.edu%3A1840.16%2F2535