Electronic contracting in aircraft aftercare: a case study

Distributed systems comprised of autonomous self-interested entities require some sort of control mechanism to ensure the predictability of the interactions that drive them. This is certainly true in the aerospace domain, where manufacturers, suppliers and operators must coordinate their activities to maximise safety and profit, for example. To address this need, the notion of norms has been proposed which, when incorporated into formal electronic documents, allow for the specification and deployment of contractdriven systems. In this context, we describe the CONTRACT framework and architecture for exactly this purpose, and describe a concrete instantiation of this architecture as a prototype system applied to an aerospace aftercare scenario. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.10 [Software]: Software Engineering; I.2.11 [Artificial Intelligence]: Distributed Artificial Intelligence--multi-agent systems General Terms Design, Experimentation Keywords Electronic contracting, norms, c...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Felipe Rech Meneguzzi, Simon Miles, Michael Luck, Camden Holt, Malcolm Smith
• Keywords: Aerospace Aftercare Scenario, ATAL 2008, Autonomous Self-interested Entities, Formal Electronic Documents, Intelligent Agents