A survey of flexible agent interaction approaches

Abstract

The dynamic and complex application domains of today demand increased flexibility in inter-agent interactions, i.e. an increased ability of agents to consider changes in the system or behavior of other agents and choose from multiple ways of interacting with other agents to achieve the same goals. A number of approaches to support such flexible interactions have been proposed in the existing literature, and we offer an extensive review of these approaches, classifying them according to the manner in which they achieve flexibility. Each type of approaches is appraised using our novel analytical framework. Finally, we demonstrate how this framework can be used to identify which approaches are suitable for a given application domain, and we exemplify this aspect using the domains of e-commerce and dynamic service composition.