A Formal Framework for Behavioural Reuse of Agent Components: Application to Interaction Protocols

This paper focuses on the reuse of agent components in open multi-agent systems, and argues that the traditional approaches used in software multiagent systems are limited and not rigorous. On this basis, we propose a formal framework for the definition of behavioural reuse in agent components systems. This framework is based upon the preorder relations which are considered in the study of concurrent systems, allowing to define various reuse relations related to substitutability principal. We investigate the property preservation to the degree of change of these subtyping reuse relations, safety and liveness properties are preserved up to different extents. Examples of interaction protocols such as the contract net Protocol are given to illustrate our approach.