Dynamic role binding with Agent-centric Contract Net Protocol in agent organizations

As open multi-agents systems are getting increasing attentions in building large-scale software systems, the study on agent organizations - a building block of multi-agents systems, becomes a promising research track. Roles as a first class citizen in agent organizations impose an imperious demand for dealing with the major challenge: how agents bind roles in the formation of agent organizations in which agents can dynamically enter or leave the organizations. This challenge can be further decomposed into four issues: how to discover agents distributed over various organizations, how to select reliable agents to bind roles, how to enable agents to cooperate in roles binding, and how to unbind roles as agents leave an organization. The focus of this paper is on an extension to Contract Net protocol with reputation model to address these four issues related to the life cycle of dynamic role binding, called Agent-centric Contract Net Protocol (ACNP), as a negotiation mechanism that agents can adopt to establish agent organizations at run time through roles binding.