A Colored Petri Net based approach for multi-agent interactions

In a multi-agent system (MAS), agent interactions are established through exchanging messages following interaction protocols. Most current agent interaction protocols are hard-coded within agents during the agent designing, and this feature greatly reduces the flexibility of the agent interactions. In this paper, we present a Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) based approach to form flexible interaction protocols between agents. Through this approach, agents can analyse a protocol and check whether the protocol is “understandable” and advantageous to the objectives of agents.