Note: marked with red are open action items.

2009-03-26 Fri Teleconference

Participants: Munindar, Kartik, Michael

Topics:

• Walk through deliverables page. Everyone has made contributions and checked statements
• Munindar will check that all model files are on Confluence and are linked from the text in their latest version
• Michael will link to papers that Munindar has uploaded; will restructure the Interaction pattern section
• Kartik will upload code for (a) the current Jade ContractNet example (b) a previous Jess-based rules model for negotiations
• Goal: by tonight, have a candidate version of the deliverable report
• Next steps: Munindar and Kartik work on specifics of commitment composition and data model

2009-03-17 Tue Teleconference

Participants: Munindar, Kartik, Matthew, Michael, Emilia

Topics:

• Kartik made a tool demo, showing the JADE Sniffer, Remote Agent Management GUI, Directory Facilitator GUI, Introspector.
• Every system component is an agent

2009-03-13 Fri Teleconference

Participants: Kartik, Matthew, Emilia

Topics:...

2009-03-11 Wed Internal Meeting

Participants: Matthew, Michael, Emilia

Topics:

• Analyze the two document sent by Munindar regarding contracts (paper & project report)

2009-03-09 Mon Internal Meeting

Participants: Michael, Emilia

Topics

• Refine the interaction diagrams for the negotiation protocol. Show creation and release of commitments, as well as states at the end.

2009-03-06 Fri Teleconference

Participants: Munindar, Kartik, Dorian, Michael, Emilia

Discussion topics

• Kartik made a tool demo, showing the JADE Sniffer, Remote Agent Management GUI, Directory Facilitator GUI, Introspector. Especially the Sniffer & Introspector are very useful for debugging.
• Munindar & Kartik showed an interaction protocol & code demo for making an order between a customer and a merchant. The demo showed the communication between two agents, both with Jess reasoning.
  • the protocol: order.clp. It's an older style for protocols; needs refinement.
  • the skeletons for Merchant and Customer can be (automatically) derived from the protocol.
  • Merchant policies, Customer policies - skeleton generated, but the Java code that backs them up is manually. You manually supply the business rules.
    The repository of facts is local to each agent.
• Emilia presented Message Sequence Charts for the negotiation protocol

Action items

• Munindar - Refine the model for commitments and organizations. Define all terms such as antecedent and consequent.
• Emilia & Michael - refine the MSC diagrams
• Kartik - refine prototype
• Kartik - add in Confluence a pdf with the order.clp, and merchant & customer

2009-02-27 Fri Teleconference

Participants: Munindar, Kartik, Dorian, Alex, Matthew, Emilia

Discussion topics

• Emilia presented a refined domain model for JADE
• Kartik did a Prototype Demo with JADE and Jess, using the FIPA ContractNet protocol
• Ideas:
  • Jess - rules to evaluate (accept/reject) a proposal
  • Commitments would be a "fact" in Jess. Facts allow you to make any assertions. Commitments are one type of assertions.
  • Commitments are made of antecedent and consequent
  • We need to record all commitments made while doing through the conversation. At any point, we should be able to say which commitments were made and which constraints still need to be negotiated
  • Agents negociate and make commitments: they will participate in this interaction protocol under this role

Action items till next meeting Friday

• Kartik & Dorian - install the JADE tools - Sniffer, Introspector, Dummy Agent, Directory Facilitator GUI, Remote Management Agent, etc.
• Refine the model for commitments and organizations. Define all terms such as antecedent and consequent.
• Refine the prototype example - account for commitment as 1st class entity

Issues to be considered later in the project:

• expand the Agent Lifecyle: look at 1451 model, which has more details for active, initiated, etc. OOI needs different lifecycle models for entities (instruments, processes, etc). FIPA only allows one model for all agents
• decide how to divide the work between behaviors in Jade and Jess (using cyclic behaviors is easy; the ContractNet behaviors are more complex)
• emerge a language for commitments

2009-02-23 Mon Internal meeting

Participants: Matthew, Emilia

Discussion topic: contracts for the use case of joining a facility and requesting access to resources.

• The use case: I invite you to be a member if you give me access to your contact info and public credential in the Directory Facilitator (DF). The other party says yes or no; there is no counterproposing here, no Back and Forth. Assumption: you know about the existence of the community. By becoming a member you get some default rights; you can access the DF, and there are a few artifacts that are available to all members. But you have to be able to interact with the DF. Becoming a member, you are giving the rights to access your DF.
• The  membership contract has a life cycle: create (negotiate the membership contract), revoke the contract, hold the contract (put it on warning; you think you have a contract suspect, and you want to supervise all actions for the contract), activate (there is a duration of a contract; if the contract starts in March, you create it now and activate it on March 1st), deactivate (when the contract is expired). The contract is a state machine, it can be active or non active. The contract can be revoked at any time, but revoke is a negotiation, or at least an announcement; revoke results in deactivation, expire results in deactivation.
• You make a request to become a member. Alternatively, somebody can sponsor you. Contracts can also be delegated to somebodyelse.
• Ultimately, we will talk about groups, individual,  & anonymous rights.
• Negotiate = just give rights in this context. "I want these rights to this space". The content of the contract is the behavior on the resource

2009-02-20 Fri Teleconference

Participants: Munindar, Kartik, Dorian, Matthew, Emilia

Discussion topics:

• Munindar presented Commitment Alignment: semantics of commitment operations, misalignment causes, agent behavior, and how to guarantee alignment. Brief notes:
  Each party has many choices based on its local strategy, and the goal is to allow many paths of interactions.
  The notion of compliance = as long as somebody does not violate a commitment.
  Requirements: messages sent by an agent will be delivered in the same order at the destination; you have to wait for all the messages to be landed in order to have alignment; propagate vital information.
  Principles for commitments: you can't make a weaker commitment, you can't reject half an offer, etc.
• Emilia presented initial drafts for domain models for Contracts and JADE
• Composing protocols. We have to ensure that the individual protocols are enactable; the middleware will take care of the commitments.

Action items:

• Refine the contract model
  • Munindar has seen other models for contracts. When he finds the info, he will send it to the rest of the team.
  • Think of specific contracts for the use case of joining a facility and requesting access to resources. We should get an enumeration of possible antecedent, consequent, penalty, etc. Matthew and Emilia will discuss the topic on Monday 10am.
• Prototype Demo
  • Dorian and Kartik decide when to do a code demo next week; Wednesday or Friday 10am.
  • Arrange with Rita a Webex session for that meeting.
  • Refine JADE domain model
• Logistics - Emilia will gather all action items and notes from past meetings in Confluence

2009-02-18 Wed Teleconference

Participants:  Munindar, Kartik, Emilia

Discussion topics:

• Munindar presented basic interaction protocols for Negotiation, Attribute Authority Administer, Join, Check Attribute, Escalate. We don't constraint the interaction in terms of sequence of messages, but in terms of content.
• Emilia presented initial domain model for Agent Contract network, extracted from COI models for FDR

Action items:

• Domain model for contracts. What kind of contracts do we want to provide? Contract = policies, as agreed upon by both parties; only parts of the policy is revealed in the contract.
• Domain model for JADE. It has Agents, Behavios, messages, the ability to store commitments - Jess.
• Munindar will send a presentation on how to map protocol to state machines, which will be discussed on Friday.
• Kartik and Dorian - start the prototype. The goal is to have agents speaking to each other, and store commitments.
• Domain model for messages: sender, receiver, content, etc. What should be the content for a Proposal message, for example.
• Refine the protocol in the textual notation  (a little more formalized for now; formalize later in the project)
• Refine the diagrams to depict the possible cases from the protocols (and to show commitments in the diagram?).
• Next meeting: Friday 10-11am.

2009-02-17 Tue Development team meeting

Participants: Dorian, Alex, Claudiu, Emilia, Matthew

Discussion topics: decide the activities for each development effort for the first iteration. For the Agent Contract Network, the focus is on:

• domain model Agent C.N.
• interaction protocols, 5 use cases
• contracts
• domain models for Jade
• simple prototype for use cases
• Domain model for specifying interaction patterns

2009-02-12 Thu Agent C.N. Internal meeting

Participants: Dorian, Alex, Emilia, Matthew

Discussion topics:

• Emilia presented
  • domain model for interaction specification
  • the visual representation of Message Sequence Charts (MSCs), examples
  • example of textual representations of MSCs, the EBNF grammar, and an example of the input for Ingolf's Ruby tool.
  • showed the initial domain models for Agent Contract Network, as extracted from the COI FDR documentation
• Discussion about tools: translating from graphical representation into textual representation, and generating state machines for each role

Action items:

• detail the Message specification.
• domain model from Jade. What it covers from our models?
• top level activities for the 6 efforts (Agent C.N is one of them), where we are involved in.
  
• Matthew requested access what Ingolf's group has (documents and code) for interaction specifications, specifically:
  1. detailed data model for interaction specifications
  2. access to grammar
  3. access to code that parses and produces the data model
  4. maybe later - access code generator for the roles

2009-02-10 Teleconference

Participants: Munindar, Kartik, Michael, Emilia, Matthew

Discussion topics:

• Emilia presented the initial interaction protocol for joining a community
• Michael explained the specific roles from Data Distribution Network
• Matthew provided feedback on the registrant side of the interaction protocol
• Munindar discussed about simplifying the messages and the interaction

Action items:

• Emilia - Initial domain model for Agent CN
• Munindar - refine the join interactionn protocol; define basic protocols
• Kartik & Dorian try FIPA.
• Add to confluence page references to diagrams in COI and IOI
• next telecon on Wednesday

2009-02-04 Teleconference

Participants: Munindar, Kartik, Dorian, Michael, Emilia, Matthew

Discussion topics:

• Matthew & Michael presented use cases for Iteration 1. Specific Agents: Client agent, Exchange point, Exchange space, Broker
• Munindar presented commitment concepts. Agents collect commitments during the process of negotiations
  Matthew's goal: Atomic act of negotiation that leaves commitments on both sides of the negotiation, such that commitments can be used by the respective inter-ceptors on the client side and in the resource environment. Owners of the respective environments govern the interactions.
• Technology: JADE + Jess. JADE: Jade is currently used (versus Jack), currently pretty active community. Rule based package potentially Jess; provides reasonable support for our needed properties, but cannot express all properties.

Action items:

• Confluence page for Agent CN, list use cases in general terms and with specific agents from Data Distribution Network
• Refine list of SoW tasks by next week
• Start resource use negotiation scenario