Commitments and Causality for Multiagent Design

This paper unifies two recent strands of research in multiagent system design. One, commitments are widely recognized as capturing important aspects of interactions among agents, but current approaches tend to emphasize individual commitments and typically restrict themselves to interactions between pairs of agents. Two, methodologies for multiagent system design consider protocols and coordination requirements, but do not seriously accommodate commitments. This paper proposes a methodology to infer commitments from an example conversation among several parties. Based on the conversation, we build a commitment causality diagram indicating the causal relations among the commitments. Using this diagram, we generate behavior models for each role. We show that the models produced successfully capture commitment-level protocols and allow flexible implementation of non-commitment communications provided the causal relations are preserved.