The Scoop on Agent Interaction Protocols

Dear all

Over the last fifteen years, there have been significant advances in
representations of agent interaction protocols.  A significant breakthrough
is the idea of multiagent information protocols.   This approach

- is formal and declarative;
- can be used to model diverse multiagent applications;
- supports maximally flexible interactions between agents;
- supports interaction meaning, which facilitates intelligent decision
making by agents; and
- enables realizing loosely-coupled, decentralized systems of
asynchronously communicating, heterogeneous agents;
- boasts several working prototypes (https://gitlab.com/masr).

These features are well-suited to the Agentic paradigm and potential
standardization.

Below are some papers describing this approach, which we call
Interaction-Oriented Programming (IOP).  They collectively demonstrate the
sophistication and simplicity of the approach but if you had to pick three
papers to look at, I'd pick [5], [9], and [1] in that order. [10] is where
this line of work is headed.

1. (AAMAS) The BSPL Protocol language:
https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/papers/mas/AAMAS-11-IBIOP.pdf
2. (AAMAS) BSPL Semantics and Verification:
https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/papers/mas/AAMAS-12-BSPL.pdf
3. (Services Computing) Methodology for specfiying protocols:
https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/papers/mas/SCC-14-Bliss.pdf
4. (JAIR) Advantage of our approach over alternative protocol specification
approaches, both formal and informal:
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/chopraak/pdfs/langeval.pdf
5. (AAMAS) A Python programming model for BSPL:
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/chopraak/pdfs/Kiko.pdf
6. (JAAMAS) A programming model for fault tolerance:
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/chopraak/pdfs/mandrake.pdf
7. (IJCAI) Efficient verification:
https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/papers/mas/IJCAI-21-Tango.pdf
8. (AAAI) A belief-desire-intention programming model for BSPL:
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/chopraak/pdfs/orpheus.pdf
9. (AAMAS) Meaning-based programming model:
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/chopraak/pdfs/azorus.pdf
10. (IJCAI) Langshaw, an even higher-level protocol language that compiles
into BSPL: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/chopraak/pdfs/langshaw.pdf

There's a lot more here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/chopraak/ and
even more here: https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/papers/

Questions and feedback welcome!

Best
Amit Chopra