Where Agent Protocols Stop: Cross-Layer Gaps in Authority, Commitment, Evidence, and Service Closure

Local protocol success is not sufficient to close an agent service. We study when locally conformant protocol states justify relationship-level service closure across agent stacks. A protocol-neutral Agent Service Episode (ASE) separates capability, authority, commitment, process, authoritative external effect, evidence/acceptance, responsibility, and relationship state. The protocol corpus uses a specification snapshot cutoff of 15 September 2026. Two authors independently coded nine semantic-ownership dimensions. On 32 held-out cells, exact agreement was 78.1%, Cohen's $\kappa=0.566$ (bootstrap 95% CI $[0.295,0.815]$), and nominal Krippendorff's $\alpha=0.564$; the held-out sample contained no Delegated labels, so D/U reproducibility is not estimated. All six families natively own action/process semantics, but none owns or names an external owner for authoritative external effect or service closure at ASE scope; all 12 corresponding raw judgments were independently U/U. An Alloy upper-bound model shows that the strongest observed local semantics do not entail ASE closure. An integrated binding model establishes bounded joint realizability and single-removal non-redundancy, with D0 used as an encoding-alignment regression. An executable Agent Service Binding Profile demonstrates the same bindings on invariant-targeted CAD/CAE/PLM traces in a coverage/feasibility study. Thus, within this protocol snapshot, $\mathsf{TaskCompleted}$ does not by itself license $\mathsf{Closed}$. For Agentic Services Computing, service closure is a first-class cross-layer governance decision whose owner and validation rule must be explicit.

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Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-10-18
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23448028
Primary Topic
Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
Type
preprint
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preprint

Where Agent Protocols Stop: Cross-Layer Gaps in Authority, Commitment, Evidence, and Service Closure

Xiang He, Mingyi Liu, Shuang Yu, Zhongjie Wang
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
preprint

Where Agent Protocols Stop: Cross-Layer Gaps in Authority, Commitment, Evidence, and Service Closure

Xiang He, Mingyi Liu, Shuang Yu, Zhongjie Wang
preprint en

Abstract

Local protocol success is not sufficient to close an agent service. We study when locally conformant protocol states justify relationship-level service closure across agent stacks. A protocol-neutral Agent Service Episode (ASE) separates capability, authority, commitment, process, authoritative external effect, evidence/acceptance, responsibility, and relationship state. The protocol corpus uses a specification snapshot cutoff of 15 September 2026. Two authors independently coded nine semantic-ownership dimensions. On 32 held-out cells, exact agreement was 78.1%, Cohen's $\kappa=0.566$ (bootstrap 95% CI $[0.295,0.815]$), and nominal Krippendorff's $\alpha=0.564$; the held-out sample contained no Delegated labels, so D/U reproducibility is not estimated. All six families natively own action/process semantics, but none owns or names an external owner for authoritative external effect or service closure at ASE scope; all 12 corresponding raw judgments were independently U/U. An Alloy upper-bound model shows that the strongest observed local semantics do not entail ASE closure. An integrated binding model establishes bounded joint realizability and single-removal non-redundancy, with D0 used as an encoding-alignment regression. An executable Agent Service Binding Profile demonstrates the same bindings on invariant-targeted CAD/CAE/PLM traces in a coverage/feasibility study. Thus, within this protocol snapshot, $\mathsf{TaskCompleted}$ does not by itself license $\mathsf{Closed}$. For Agentic Services Computing, service closure is a first-class cross-layer governance decision whose owner and validation rule must be explicit.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Harbin Institute of Technology (CN)
Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
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