Toward Engineering Agentic Systems Based on Interaction Protocols

 Dear all

It's great to see interest in applying approaches developed in the
multiagent systems (MAS) community toward building Agentic systems.

My colleagues (Munindar Singh, Samuel Christie, and Matteo Baldoni) and I
have been working on approaches for specifying interaction protocols
between agents.  Our approaches are formal and declarative; support
interaction meaning (which facilitates intelligent decision making by
agents); and enable realizing loosely-coupled, decentralized systems of
asynchronously communicating agents.  Moreover, our approaches support
maximally flexible interactions between agents.  These features make our
approach, which we call Interaction-Oriented Programming (IOP), ideally
suited to the Agentic paradigm.

Below are some papers describing our approach.

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/

Our ever-growing software repository is available here:
https://gitlab.com/masr

FIPA standards and KQML are unsuited to engineering multiagent systems.
FIPA ACL's and KQML's semantics are ill-conceived. FIPA Interaction
Protocols capture only a handful of interaction patterns via informal
notations such as UML.  These shortcomings are well-known in the MAS
community. For more details, see
https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/papers/mas/computer-acl-98.pdf
and https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/chopraak/pdfs/ac-directions-2013.pdf
(especially Singh's on page 15).  IOP addresses the shortcomings of the
FIPA standards and KQML.

I hope my post leads to a more informed discussion of agent communication
approaches.  As we seek to establish the relevance of multiagent systems
work for Agentic, let us not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Best
Amit Chopra