Turtles: Protocol-Based Foundations for Distributed Multiagent Systems

海龟：分布式多代理系统的基于协议的基础

• 批准号: EP/N027833/2
• 负责人: Nobuko Yoshida
• 金额: $ 27.29万
• 依托单位: University of Oxford
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FN027833%2F2
• 关键词: Turtles; Protocol; Based; Foundations; Distributed

There is growing interest in distributed systems and architectures whose components are autonomous social parties such as humans and organisations. The parties in such systems interact with each other via their software agents for the purposes of exchanging information and services. The interactions normally take the form of conversations (as opposed to invocations) realised over asynchronous messaging. Naturally, a crucial area of study for computer science and software engineering is the specification and enactment of interaction protocols, that is, the rules of encounter by which parties in the system would interact. Considered as such, the notion of protocol represents a generalisation of the notion of "contract" advocated in Design by Contract approaches.A key question concerns the nature of contracts. Work in areas such as concurrency and Web services, has predominantly conceptualised protocols in terms of message ordering and occurrence constraints that must be respected by the parties' agents. We refer to such protocols as messaging protocols. Although messaging protocols serve the important purpose of distributed coordination, considered as contracts, they are too low-level for multiagent settings of autonomous parties. Specifically, they do not capture social constraints such as the commitments that are binding on the parties in the interaction.This gap represents a substantial opportunity. In real life, commitments in fact represent the atoms of what people normally understand as contracts. Commitments accommodate the balance between, on the one hand, autonomy and flexibility, and, on the other hand, correct behaviour. Commitment specifications capture stakeholder requirements in multiparty domains. Further, the states of commitments underlie most key performance indicators (KPIs) that stakeholders are interested in any multiagent domain. Work in commitment protocols in multiagent systems has made progress in developing computational abstractions for commitments. However, important challenges related to expressiveness and distributed enactment of commitment protocols have not even been adequately formulated, let alone tackled. Ensuring correct distributed enactment for expressive commitment protocols is crucial to realising the full value of commitments as a human-level architectural abstraction.The broad objective of Turtles is to bring commitment-based contracts to distributed computing. This project develops foundational theory, software, and methodology for building commitment-based distributed systems. To encourage wider adoption, the project will embed the algorithms in prototypes, and develop a tool-supported methodology for specifying and implementing social protocols. Further, Turtles will develop real systems based on use cases and practices from a number of industrial partners and evaluate these systems based on their feedback.The success of Turtles will enable capturing important subtleties of real-life social and business interactions and transform how we design software systems for crucial multiparty domains such as healthcare, disaster response, smart cities, banking, education, and e-commerce and e-business, where commitments are crucial.

对分布式系统和架构的兴趣越来越大，其组成部分是人类和组织等自治社会政党。此类系统中的各方通过其软件代理相互交互，以交换信息和服务。相互作用通常采取对话的形式（而不是调用），这是在异步消息传递上实现的。自然，计算机科学和软件工程研究的关键领域是交互协议的规范和制定，即系统中各方相互作用的相遇规则。因此，协议的概念代表了通过合同方法在设计中提倡的“合同”概念的概括。一个关键问题涉及合同的性质。在并发和Web服务等领域的工作主要是在消息顺序和事件约束方面概念化协议，这些协议必须受到当事方代理商必须尊重的。我们将这些协议称为消息协议。尽管消息传递协议是分布式协调的重要目的（被认为是合同），但对于自治政党的多种设置而言，它们太低了。具体而言，它们没有捕获社会约束，例如对互动中各方具有约束力的承诺。这一差距代表了一个实质性的机会。在现实生活中，承诺实际上代表了人们通常理解为合同的原子。承诺一方面是自主和灵活性之间的平衡，另一方面，正确的行为。承诺规格捕获了多方域中的利益相关者要求。此外，承诺状态是大多数关键绩效指标（KPI）对利益相关者对任何多种领域感兴趣的人。在多种系统中的承诺协议中的工作在开发承诺的计算抽象方面取得了进步。但是，与表现力和分布式承诺方案的分布相关的重要挑战甚至没有得到充分提出，更不用说解决了。确保正确的表达承诺协议的分布式制定对于将承诺的全部价值视为人类水平的建筑抽象至关重要。该项目开发了用于构建基于承诺的分布式系统的基础理论，软件和方法。为了鼓励更广泛的采用，该项目将嵌入原型中的算法，并开发一种用于指定和实施社会协议的工具支持的方法。此外，乌龟将根据许多工业伙伴的用例和实践开发真实的系统，并根据其反馈评估这些系统。

项目成果

Designing Asynchronous Multiparty Protocols with Crash-Stop Failures (Artifact)

设计具有紧急停止故障的异步多方协议（工件）

• DOI: 10.4230/darts.9.2.9
• 发表时间: 2023
• 作者: Barwell A

Dynamically Updatable Multiparty Session Protocols (Artifact)

动态可更新的多方会话协议（Artifact）

• DOI: 10.4230/darts.9.2.10
• 发表时间: 2023
• 作者: Castro-Perez D

Designing Asynchronous Multiparty Protocols with Crash-Stop Failures

设计具有紧急停止故障的异步多方协议

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2305.06238
• 发表时间: 2023
• 作者: Barwell A

Hybrid Multiparty Session Types -- Full Version

混合多方会话类型 - 完整版

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2302.01979
• 发表时间: 2023
• 作者: Gheri L

Hybrid Multiparty Session Types: Compositionality for Protocol Specification through Endpoint Projection

混合多方会话类型：通过端点投影实现协议规范的组合性

• DOI: 10.1145/3586031
• 发表时间: 2023
• 期刊: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
• 作者: Gheri L