Interaction Petri Nets for Modeling Multiagent Interactions

Petri nets have been closely related to multiagent systems (MAS) and used as a tool for modeling agents and their behavior for specification, verification, and validation purposes. Various models of agent activities, plans, and interactions show the ability of Petri nets to represent dynamic and concurrent MAS. Insight from previous Petri net models of agent interaction led to the proposal of a Colored Petri net model for monitoring the state of communication. This paper presents an interaction Colored Petri net for modeling message-based communication ruled by Interaction Protocols (IP). While previous works focused on modeling a single protocol, the proposed Interaction Petri Net (IPN) allows specifying multiple protocols within one model. Moreover, IPN allows the detection of common communication errors such as: lost messages, delay, busy-wait and agent termination. In IPN, an interaction protocol is specified as a Petri net marking where tokens are message instances. This approach enables the capture of the status of each IP in real-time for error detection where two possible approaches have been examined. The proposed model has been validated through a comparison analysis with a previous Petri net model of interaction.