Preserving players goals: a choreography-driven matchmaking approach

An agent interaction protocol, a service choreography, can quite naturally be interpreted as an alliance of parties, which cooperate to achieve a goal. On the other hand, each participant entered the alliance moved by goals of its own, which it would like to fulfill by playing one of the roles. The achievement of the shared and of the specific goals depend both on the interaction schema, that is captured by the choreography, and on the participant’s capabilities, where by this word we mean the skills of the participant, the actions that it can execute. We show in this paper that the choice of which capabilities to use cannot rely totally on local criteria, as instead it is commonly done by the approaches to matchmaking, but it must take into account the choreography/protocol. This happens whenever the match is not exact, e.g. when plugin match is used. We also describe an extended plugin match that takes into account also the constraints given by the choreography for performing the capability selection.