Social commitments and the Contract Net

Software agents are a new paradigm for the design of distributed computing systems. Collaboration is necessary within a multi-agent system. Agents must be able to converse in order to collaborate effectively. Current agent communication languages have been criticized for not fully supporting agent conversations due to a lack of conversational coherence.; A model of agent communication based upon social commitments has recently been proposed in order to address this lack of coherence. However, there exists only trivial examples demonstrating this models application.; The Contract Net is a well known task allocation mechanism that requires non-trivial communication. Through the use of formal methods and software implementation, this thesis demonstrates that a communication model based on social commitments can be used to support the communication needs inherent within the bidding mechanism of the Contract Net protocol.