Incorporating Conversation Managers into Multi-agent Systems

This paper presents ongoing research into enhancing high-level communication capability in multi-agent systems through modeling agent conversations and incorporating distributed conversation managers. First, conversations are formulated as task-oriented descriptive units, called conversation schemata, by capturing interaction patterns, task constraints, and task-related information of agents. After verification, conversation schemata are translated into production rule sets and implemented as Java threads. Second, coordination of conversations is enabled by incorporating a set of distributed agents—conversation managers. A 'proof-of- concept' implementation shows the potential of this approach.