Protocol based Communication for Situated Agents Danny Weyns Elke Steegmans Tom Holvoet AgentWise DistriNet Leuven Celestijnenlaan Leuven Belgium The full version this paper appeared Proceedings The International Joint Conference Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems Eds Jennings Sierra Sonenberg Tambe ACM Press Introduction Collaborations situated behavior based agent systems typically have emerge from the individual selected actions the agents Usually communication happens indirectly depositing pheromone trails the environment this paper outline approach for situated agents set explicit collaborations Roles and situated commitments Explicit collaborations are reflected mutual commitments use the notion situated commitment basis for collaboration Contrary the traditional approaches commitment that take psychological viewpoint commitments are based the agents mutually dependent mental states and goal oriented plan situated commitment social attitude situated commitments are based the roles the involved agents and the local context they are placed use model for action selection that based hierarchical free flow architecture The hierarchy composed nodes which receive information from internal and external stimuli the form activity The nodes feed their activity down through the hierarchy until the activity arrives the action nodes where winner takes all process decides which action selected Existing free flow architectures are designed from the viewpoint individual agents Th