Competent Agents and Customising Protocols

In open agent societies, communication protocols and strategies cannot be assumed to always match perfectly, because they are typically specified by different designers. These potential discrepancies raise a number of interesting issues, most notably the problem of checking that the behaviour of an agent is (or will be) conformant to the rules described by a protocol. In this paper, we argue that the ability to merely conform to a protocol is not sufficient for an agent to be a competent user of that protocol. We approach the intuitive idea of protocol competence by introducing a notion that considers, broadly speaking, an agent’s ability to reach a particular state of the interaction and we provide preliminary results that allow us to automatically check competence in the context of a specific class of logic-based agents. Finally, we illustrate how these results can facilitate the customisation of protocols used by agents that are not fully competent.