A distributed treatment of exceptions in multiagent contracts: Preliminary Report

Commitments are key to contract-based multiagent systems. When

agents enter a contract, they project the outcome of the contract based on its

content as well as their past experiences and the current world state. We model

an agent’s projections as individual world states, e.g., a satisfactory state. If the

contract is indeed executed to satisfy these projections, then the agent is said

to complete the contract successfully. If not, we expect the agent to take proper

action. This paper formalizes the notion of projection and its relations, to contract

execution. Accordingly, we propose a satisfiability relation to check if an agent’s

state complies with its projections. We then relate satisfiability to the occurrence

of exceptions.