Using Colored Petri Nets for Conversation Modeling

Conversations are a useful means of structuring communicative interactions among agents. The value of a conversation-based approach is largely determined by the conversational model it uses. Finite State Machines, used heavily to date for this purpose, are not sufficient for complex agent interactions requiring a notion of concurrency. We propose the use of Colored Petri Nets as a model underlying a language for conversation specification. This carries the relative simplicity and graphical representation of the former approach, along with greater expressive power and support for concurrency. The construction of such a language, Protolingua, is currently being investigated within the framework of the Jackal agent development environment. In this paper, we explore the use of Colored Petri Nets in modeling agent communicative interaction.