University of Groningen Cognitive Science and Engineering

The process of cooperative problem solving can be divided into four stages. First, nding potential team members, then forming a team followed by constructing a plan for that team. Finally, the plan is executed by the team. Traditionally, very simple protocols like the Contract Net protocol are used for performing the rst two stages of the process. And often the team is already taken for granted. In an open environment (like in e.g. electronic commerce) however, there can be discussion among the agents in order to form a team that can achieve the collective goal of solving the problem. For these cases xed protocols like contract net do not su ce. In this paper we present an alternative solution, using structured dialogues that can be shown to lead to the required team formation. The dialogues are described formally (using some modal logics), thus making it possible to actually prove that a certain dialogue has a speci c outcome.