{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Tango: Declarative Semantics for Multiagent Communication Protocols","authors":[{"name":"Munindar P. Singh","slug":"munindar-p-singh","given":"Munindar P.","family":"Singh","affiliation":"Department of Computer Science , North Carolina State University , Raleigh , NC 27695 , USA"},{"name":"Samuel H. Christie V.","slug":"samuel-h-christie-v","given":"Samuel H.","family":"Christie V.","affiliation":"Department of Computer Science , North Carolina State University , Raleigh , NC 27695 , USA; School of Computing and Communications , Lancaster University , Lancaster LA1 4WA , UK"}],"abstract":"A flexible communication protocol is necessary to build a decentralized multiagent system whose member agents are not coupled to each other's decision making.\r\nInformation-based protocol languages capture a protocol in terms of causality and integrity constraints based on the information exchanged by the agents. Thus, they enable highly flexible enactments in which the agents proceed asynchronously and messages may be arbitrarily reordered. However, the existing semantics for such languages can produce a large number of protocol enactments, which makes verification of a protocol property intractable.\r\n\r\nThis paper formulates a protocol semantics declaratively via inference rules that determine when a message emission or reception becomes enabled during an enactment, and its effect on the local state of an agent.\r\nThe semantics enables heuristics for determining when alternative extensions of a current enactment would be equivalent, thereby helping produce parsimonious models and yielding improved protocol verification methods.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2021/55","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/55","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/0055.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/55.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/bibtex/55","volume":{"slug":"2021","title":"Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2021","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/","year":2021,"location":"Montreal","dates":"19-27 August 2021","editors":"Zhi-Hua Zhou","isbn":"978-0-9992411-9-6","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2021"},"section":"Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems","track":"Main Track","number":55,"pages":{"first":391,"last":397},"keywords":["Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Engineering Methods, Platforms, Languages and Tools","Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Agent Communication"],"videos":[],"references":[{"position":1,"raw":"[Baldoni et al., 2015] Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Amit K. 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