Designing Complex Agent Interaction Protocols Using Colored Petri Nets: The Cloud Services Composition Case Study

This paper deals with one of the key issue in modern enterprises applications: the Agents Interaction Protocols (AiP) that are interconnecting the different parts involved in collaborative activities. The challenge here is twofold. First, we must provide a formal model that is rich enough to capture interactions characteristics. Second, we must allow designers to combine existing protocols to achieve a new specific need. The paper introduces a formal analysis framework allowing the verification of the conformance between interaction protocols. The semantics of AiP notations used in our approach and its application are described on the basis of translation rules into colored Petri net. The key feature of this framework is the ability to model and formally verify composition of AiP, where particular protocols may then be selected and composed to support a new business task. Furthermore, an agent-based architecture that supports our approach is developed. The main goal of the proposed architecture is to address and tackle AiP composition in the context of Cloud-based enterprise application. Designing Complex Agent Interaction Protocols Using Colored Petri Nets: The Cloud Services Composition Case Study