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Publication summary
Author(s): David Flater
Publication date: May 2000
Citation: David Flater: "Debugging Agent Interactions: A Case Study," To appear in the proceedings of the 6th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, March 2001.
Key words: agents, distributed, negotiation, scheduling
Availability:
Abstract:
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The Contract Net protocol is a general-purpose protocol for distributed problem solving.
Many modern agent infrastructures facilitate the generation of agents supporting Contract
Net. We used one such infrastructure to simulate a Contract Net-based approach to job
scheduling and found that some jobs failed to get scheduled even though the resources
were available. This paper describes two phases of the subsequent debugging effort. The
first phase was enhancing the visualization of the agent community to reveal the causes
of failed negotiations. The second phase was formalizing the problem using a Temporal
Calculus of Communicating Systems (TCCS) and attempting to find a solution. After
exploring a number of solutions that would not generalize, we found that switching from
one-phase to two-phase commitment sufficed to fix the problem.
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