Hermes: Designing Flexible and Robust Agent Interactions

Abstract

Although intelligent agents individually exhibit a number of characteristics, including social ability, flexibility, and robustness, which make them suitable to operate in complex, dynamic, and error-prone environments, these characteristics are not exhibited in multi-agent interactions. For instance, agent interactions are often not flexible or robust. This is due to the traditional message-centric design processes, notations, and methodologies currently used. To address this issue, we have developed Hermes, a goaloriented design methodology for agent interactions which is aimed at being pragmatic for practicing software engineers. Hermes focuses on interaction goals, i.e., goals of the interaction which the agents are attempting to achieve, and results in interactions that are more flexible and robust than messagecentric approaches. In this chapter, we present the design and implementation aspects of Hermes. This includes an explanation of the Hermes design processes, notations, and design artifacts, along with a detailed description of the implementation process which provides a mapping of design artifacts to goal-plan agent platforms, such as Jadex.