Abstract: This paper addresses the notion of context in multiagent systems
from an organisational point of view. Setting out from the RICA metamodel that shapes the agents' space of interaction on the
basis of hierarchical organisational and communicative abstractions, we propose
Interaction State Machines as a new formalism for the specification and
enactment of multiagent interaction protocols. By means of examples from the
FIPA interaction protocol library, we show how this formalism allows for a
successive refinement of interaction protocols, and how this process is guided
by the organisational model underlying a multiagent application.
Keywords: Interaction protocols, agent communication languages, multi-agent organizations, meta-modeling, FIPA