CPSC 601.68/599.68: Agent Communication
Winter 2008
Computer
Science
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| CPSC 601.68/599.68: Agent Communication Winter 2008 | Computer Science | |
| Note: This is an individual assignment. You may brainstorm with other students, but the bulk of the work and the bulkof the ideas must be your own. That entails that you may not share a drawing by copy-and-paste or by any other means. If you do work with other students (or anybody else) you must cite that collaboration explicitly in your handed-in assignment. This is good practice in any circumstances. |
The assignment is to write a protocol for grad student applications to the department of computer science. The basic protocol is given as a petri net, below. The black part is the basic protocol is the black part, I've given you a hint with the blue part.
But you'll notice that it isn't very realistic: it doesn't account for many (most?) of the situations that might arise, such as communication failure, refusals, or other failures. For example, what if every professor refuses a pre-app or an application? (The net isn't really wrong in this case, it just stalls, but is this the behaviour we want?) What if the department doesn't OK and application? What if a referee doesn't send in a letter by the deadline? (This one might be recoverable by the department informing the student and the student prompting the referee.) What if GS (Grad Studies) refuses an application? What if a message gets lost in the postal service? What if somebody doesn't understand something? What if a referee refuses to write a reference letter? Etc, etc, etc.
Your job is to augment this petri net to make it as complete as possible, accounting for as many "failure modes" as possible. You might even correct the basic protocol if you see fit. Some of the failures will simply be failures, but others will be recoverable (referee not send in the a reference letter as explained in the last paragraph). You should consider at least 4 modes of failure at any point in the net: lost message (timeout?), not understood, refusal, and failure (can't comply).
Here is the diagram as a power point slide, which might be convenient if you want to work with it using power point, but pencil and paper would be fine too.
Warning: I don't expect you to spend more than two hours on this assignment. The diagram can be very big, and you may not complete in two hours, but you should demonstrate to me that you know what you're doing. You might just indicate which parts are incomplete and still need work.
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| Last updated 2008-09-11 2:41 |