Q-based integrating interaction framework system for multi-agent coordination

Interaction is one of the crucial features of multi-agent systems, in which there are two kinds of interaction: agent-to-agent and human-to-agent. In order to unify the two kinds of interaction while designing multi-agent systems, this paper introduces Q language - a scenario description language for designing interaction among agents and humans. Based on Q, we propose an integrating interaction framework system for multi-agent coordination, in which Q scenarios are used to uniformly describe both kinds of interactions. Being in accordance to the characteristics of Q language, the Q-based framework makes the interaction process open and easily understood by the users. Additionally, it makes specific applications of multi-agent systems easy to be established by application designers. By applying agent negotiation in agent-mediated electronic commerce and agent cooperation in interoperable information query on the Semantic Web, we illustrate how the presented framework for multi-agent coordination is implemented in concrete applications. At the same time, these two different applications also demonstrate usability of the presented framework and verify validity of Q language.