🤖 AI Summary
Existing agent programming models struggle to coordinate internal decision-making with external interaction behaviors and lack effective abstractions for protocol adherence. This work proposes Kiko, a protocol-based agent programming model that introduces a decider abstraction, enabling agents to select actions and generate protocol-compliant messages exclusively from the set of legally permissible moves, thereby strictly adhering to interaction protocols in decentralized environments. Kiko fully encapsulates low-level communication details, supports flexible decision-making strategies, and integrates formal operational semantics to guarantee correct execution of arbitrary protocols. By doing so, it allows developers to focus on business logic while ensuring correctness and reliability in protocol enforcement within multi-agent systems.
📝 Abstract
Realizing a multiagent system involves implementing member agents who interact based on a protocol while making decisions in a decentralized manner. Current programming models for agents offer poor abstractions for decision making and fail to adequately bridge an agent's internal decision logic with its public decisions.
We present Kiko, a protocol-based programming model for agents. To implement an agent, a programmer writes one or more decision makers, each of which chooses from among a set of valid decisions and makes mutually compatible decisions on what messages to send. By completely abstracting away the underlying communication service and by supporting practical decision-making patterns, Kiko enables agent developers to focus on business logic. We provide an operational semantics for Kiko and establish that Kiko agents are protocol compliant and able to realize any protocol enactment.