An extension to Contract Net Protocol for military agents interactions

The FIPA Contract Net Protocol (CNP) is an approach to cooperation and coordination in multi-agent systems, inspired by a market-like model. In order to solve the problems about description of military entities interactions in an agents-based modeling, the original CNP is extensively used, i.e., an extended CNP is proposed in this paper. The proposed extended CNP, which is based on FIPA standards, has been designed to facilitate a flexible cooperation in dynamic military task scheduling during distributed-agents-based military system modeling and to support intelligent interactions in military operations domains, because of the functions of conditions constraints and confirmations for some key military tasks in contrast to the original CNP. The organization model of the extended CNP is established and Agent Unified Modeling Language (AUML) sequence diagram, AUML collaboration diagram, Finite State Machine (FSM) and Colored Petri Net (CPN) are applied to express the extended CNP. A generic module of Maude Language is presented to express the extended CNP process. The KQML's “performatives” is extended to perform it. The case study result proves that our approach is feasible and effective, and shows that our model, as a useful tool to describe multi-agent interactions, can be used to understand the external, complicated and intelligent military agents interactions activities for realizing the dynamic warfare actions simulation.