A Scalable Petri Net Representation of Interaction Protocols for Overhearing

In open distributed multi-agent systems, agents often coordinate using standardized agent communications. Thus, representing agent conversations is an important aspect of multi-agent applications. Lately, Petri nets have been found to provide certain advantages comparing to other representation approaches. Radically different approaches using Petri nets to represent multi-agent interactions have been proposed, and yet relative strengths and weaknesses of these approaches have not been examined. Moreover, no approach was shown to provide a comprehensive coverage of advanced standardized communication aspects such as those found in FIPA interaction protocols. This paper presents (i) an analysis of existing Petri net representation approaches in terms of their scalability and appropriateness for different tasks; (ii) a novel scalable representation approach, particularly suited for monitoring open systems; and (iii) a skeletal procedure for semi-automatically converting FIPA interaction protocols to their Petri net representations. We argue that the representation we propose is comprehensive, in the sense that it can represent all FIPA interaction protocol features.