From Intentions to Social Commitments: Adaptation in Multiagent Systems

Runtime adaptation of software systems is an area of software engi- neering that is gaining increasing attention from researchers. Adaptive software can successfully cope with failures and the volatility of the environment it operates in. Re- searchers in software requirements and architecture are especially interested in model- driven adaptation. The idea is that software would reflect upon its own model in order to reason about adaptation. This chapter represents a summary of our recent work for supporting adaptation in multiagent systems. Our key contribution is to exploit the notion of social com- mitment in order to reason about adaptation in multiagent systems. While other ap- proaches for adaptation assume cooperation or some form of logical centralization, our approach works for open multiagent systems wherein agents are autonomous and heterogeneously constructed. We conceive adaptation from the perspective of an in- tentional agent, who needs to interact with other agents in the multiagent system—by engaging in social commitments—to achieve its goals