Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

For autonomous agents and services to cooperate and interact in multi-agent environments they require well-defined protocols. A multitude of protocol languages for multi-agent systems have been proposed in the past, but they have mostly remained theoretical or have limited prototypical implementations. This work proposes a practical realisation of a general framework for defining dialogue-based bilateral interaction protocols which supports arbitrary agent-based interactions. Crucially, this work is tightly integrated with a modern framework for the creation of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, making it possible to go from protocols’ specification to their implementation and usage by agents, and enables evaluation of protocols’ effectiveness and applicability in real-world use cases.