Social commitments are recognized as an abstraction that enables flexible coordination between autonomous agents. We make these contributions. First, we introduce and formalize a concept of a maintenance commitment, a kind of social commitment characterized by a maintenance condition whose truthhood an agent commits to maintain. This concept of maintenance commitments enables us to capture a richer variety of real-world scenarios than possible using achievement commitments with a temporal condition. Second, we develop a rule-based operational semantics, by which we study the relationship between agents' achievement and maintenance goals, achievement commitments, and maintenance commitments. Third, we motivate a notion of coherence between an agents' achievement and maintenance cognitive and social constructs, and prove that, under specified conditions, the goals and commitments of both rational agents individually and of a multiagent system altogether are coherent. Fourth, we illustrate our approach with a detailed real-world scenario from an aerospace aftermarket domain.@en

This article addresses the challenge of planning coordinated activities for a set of autonomous agents, who coordinate according to social commitments among themselves. We develop a multi-agent plan in the form of a commitment protocol that allows the agents to coordinate in a flexible manner, retaining their autonomy in terms of the goals they adopt so long as their actions adhere to the commitments they have made. We consider an expressive first-order setting with probabilistic uncertainty over action outcomes. We contribute the first practical means to derive protocol enactments which maximise expected utility from the point of view of one agent. Our work makes two main contributions. First, we show how Hierarchical Task Network planning can be used to enact a previous semantics for commitment and goal alignment, and we extend that semantics in order to enact first-order commitment protocols. Second, supposing a cooperative setting, we introduce uncertainty in order to capture the reality that an agent does not know for certain that its partners will successfully act on their part of the commitment protocol. Altogether, we employ hierarchical planning techniques to check whether a commitment protocol can be enacted efficiently, and generate protocol enactments under a variety of conditions. The resulting protocol enactments can be optimised either for the expected reward or the probability of a successful execution of the protocol. We illustrate our approach on a real-world healthcare scenario.@en

In the context of a business process modeled by commitments, agents enact a protocol by carrying out goals that service their part of commitments. In a competitive or even in a cooperative setting, an agent does not know for sure that its partners will successfully act on their part of the commitments. We introduce uncertainty into a successful recent approach of planning first-order commitment protocols. Probabilities reflect a semantics of the belief of an agent about the successful completion of tasks by other agents within the protocol, capturing notions of trust. We take a deterministic Hierarchical Task Network (FITN) planner, introduce probabilities into the task networks, and derive a protocol enactment which maximizes expected utiLity from the point of view of one agent. We illustrate our approach on a business scenario in e-commerce.@en

We introduce and formalize a concept of a maintenance commitment, a kind of social commitment characterized by states whose truthhood an agent commits to maintain. This concept of maintenance commitments enables us to capture a richer variety of real-world scenarios than possible using achievement commitments with a temporal condition. By developing a rule-based operational semantics, we study the relationship between agents' achievement and maintenance goals, achievement commitments, and maintenance commitments. We motivate a notion of coherence which captures alignment between an agents' achievement and maintenance cognitive and social constructs, and prove that, under specified conditions, the goals and commitments of both rational agents individually and of a multiagent system are coherent.@en

Commitments capture how an agent relates to another agent, whereas goals describe states of the world that an agent is motivated to bring about. Commitments are elements of the social state of a set of agents whereas goals are elements of the private states of individual agents. It makes intuitive sense that goals and commitments are understood as being complementary to each other. More importantly, an agent’s goals and commitments ought to be coherent, in the sense that an agent’s goals would lead it to adopt or modify relevant commitments and an agent’s commitments would lead it to adopt or modify relevant goals. However, despite the intuitive naturalness of the above connections, they have not been adequately studied in a formal framework. This article provides a combined operational semantics for goals and commitments by relating their respective life cycles as a basis for how these concepts (1) cohere for an individual agent and (2) engender cooperation among agents. Our semantics yields important desirable properties of convergence of the configurations of cooperating agents, thereby delineating some theoretically well-founded yet practical modes of cooperation in a multiagent system.@en