COORD-1: How to Equip an Agent with a Co-ordination Protocol

The ZEUS tool-kit provides pre-built co-ordination protocols that implement various aspects of contract-net type conversations, and which are applicable for a variety of agent applications. The available protocols are listed in the 'Co-ordination Protocols' panel.

In this panel the 'Protocol' field refers to the Java file within the ZEUS class library that provides the implementation of that protocol. The 'Type' field refers to the nature of the protocol, which in keeping with the model of interaction presented earlier, will be either Initiator or Respondent.

To equip the agent with a protocol just click on the check-box beside its name, a tick will appear to indicate its selection, clicking again will clear the selection.

Click these buttons to select/unselect all the protocols.
Once a protocol has been selected an entry will appear in the 'Co-ordination Strategies' table, this is explained here.