Turtles: Protocol-Based Foundations for Distributed Multiagent Systems

人们对分布式系统和架构的兴趣越来越大，其组件是自治的社会团体，如人类和组织。这些系统中的各方通过其软件代理相互交互，以交换信息和服务。交互通常采用通过异步消息传递实现的会话（而不是调用）的形式。当然，计算机科学和软件工程的一个重要研究领域是交互协议的规范和制定，即系统中各方交互的相遇规则。因此，协议的概念代表了契约式设计方法中提倡的“契约”概念的概括。一个关键问题涉及契约的性质。在并发和Web服务等领域的工作，主要是概念化协议的消息排序和发生的限制，必须尊重各方的代理。我们将这样的协议称为消息传递协议。虽然消息传递协议服务于分布式协调的重要目的，被认为是合同，它们对于自治方的多代理设置来说太低级了。具体而言，它们没有抓住社会制约因素，如对互动各方具有约束力的承诺，这一差距代表着一个巨大的机会。在真实的生活中，承诺实际上代表了人们通常理解为合同的原子。承诺兼顾了自主性和灵活性与正确行为之间的平衡。承诺规范捕获多方域中的涉众需求。此外，承诺状态是利益相关者对任何多智能体域感兴趣的大多数关键性能指标（KPI）的基础。在多智能体系统中的承诺协议的工作已经取得了进展，在发展承诺的计算抽象。然而，与承诺议定书的表达和分布式颁布有关的重要挑战甚至还没有得到适当的制定，更不用说解决了。确保表达性承诺协议的正确分布式制定对于实现承诺作为人类级别架构抽象的全部价值至关重要。Turtles的广泛目标是将基于承诺的契约引入分布式计算。该项目开发了构建基于提交的分布式系统的基础理论，软件和方法。为了鼓励更广泛的采用，该项目将把算法嵌入到原型中，并开发一种工具支持的方法来指定和实现社交协议。此外，海龟将根据许多行业合作伙伴的用例和实践开发真实的系统，并根据他们的反馈对这些系统进行评估。海龟的成功将使我们能够捕捉现实生活中社交和商业互动的重要微妙之处，并改变我们为关键的多方领域设计软件系统的方式，如医疗保健，灾难响应，智慧城市，银行，教育，电子商务和电子商务，承诺是至关重要的。

There is growing interest in distributed systems and architectures whose components are autonomous social parties such as humans and organisations. The parties in such systems interact with each other via their software agents for the purposes of exchanging information and services. The interactions normally take the form of conversations (as opposed to invocations) realised over asynchronous messaging. Naturally, a crucial area of study for computer science and software engineering is the specification and enactment of interaction protocols, that is, the rules of encounter by which parties in the system would interact. Considered as such, the notion of protocol represents a generalisation of the notion of "contract" advocated in Design by Contract approaches.A key question concerns the nature of contracts. Work in areas such as concurrency and Web services, has predominantly conceptualised protocols in terms of message ordering and occurrence constraints that must be respected by the parties' agents. We refer to such protocols as messaging protocols. Although messaging protocols serve the important purpose of distributed coordination, considered as contracts, they are too low-level for multiagent settings of autonomous parties. Specifically, they do not capture social constraints such as the commitments that are binding on the parties in the interaction.This gap represents a substantial opportunity. In real life, commitments in fact represent the atoms of what people normally understand as contracts. Commitments accommodate the balance between, on the one hand, autonomy and flexibility, and, on the other hand, correct behaviour. Commitment specifications capture stakeholder requirements in multiparty domains. Further, the states of commitments underlie most key performance indicators (KPIs) that stakeholders are interested in any multiagent domain. Work in commitment protocols in multiagent systems has made progress in developing computational abstractions for commitments. However, important challenges related to expressiveness and distributed enactment of commitment protocols have not even been adequately formulated, let alone tackled. Ensuring correct distributed enactment for expressive commitment protocols is crucial to realising the full value of commitments as a human-level architectural abstraction.The broad objective of Turtles is to bring commitment-based contracts to distributed computing. This project develops foundational theory, software, and methodology for building commitment-based distributed systems. To encourage wider adoption, the project will embed the algorithms in prototypes, and develop a tool-supported methodology for specifying and implementing social protocols. Further, Turtles will develop real systems based on use cases and practices from a number of industrial partners and evaluate these systems based on their feedback.The success of Turtles will enable capturing important subtleties of real-life social and business interactions and transform how we design software systems for crucial multiparty domains such as healthcare, disaster response, smart cities, banking, education, and e-commerce and e-business, where commitments are crucial.