Enabling effective and emergent agent conversations

To enable effective and emergent conversations among software agents in open and distributed environment, this paper proposes a schema-based conversation modeling and manager-based conversation management approach. Conversation policies and interaction patterns among a group of agents are formulated and organized into class hierarchies of goal-directed conversation schemata, which are `sender-initialized' group interaction patterns and `receiver-responded' coordination constraints. Colored Petri Nets formalism is used for verifying conversation schemata. Using conversation schemata, conversation managers are constructed to mediate and administer conversations.