Conversation Modeling and Jackal
R. Scott Cost
UMBC

2:00pm Friday September 3, 1999
Lecture Hall V

Conversations are a useful means of structuring communicative interactions among agents. The value of a conversation-based approach is largely determined by the conversational model it uses. Finite State Machines, used heavily to date for this purpose, are not sufficient for complex agent interactions requiring a notion of concurrency. We are exploring the use of Colored Petri Nets as a model underlying a language for conversation specification. This carries the relative simplicity and graphical representation of the former approach, along with greater expressive power and support for concurrency. The construction of such a language, Protolingua, is currently being investigated within the framework of the Jackal agent development environment, a Java-based tool for communicating with the KQML agent communication language. Some features of Jackal that make it extremely valuable to agent development are its conversation management facilities, flexible, blackboard style interface and ease of integration. Jackal has been developed in support of agent systems for enterprise-wide integration of planning and execution for manufacturing.