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Decision Maker

The DecisionMaker can be thought of like a wallet manager plus "economic brain" of the AEA. It is responsible for the AEA's crypto-economic security and goal management, and it contains the preference and ownership representation of the AEA. The decision maker is the only component which has access to the wallet's private keys.

Interaction with skills

Skills communicate with the decision maker via Messages. At present, the decision maker processes messages of two protocols:

  • SigningMessage: it is used by skills to propose a transaction to the decision-maker for signing.

  • StateUpdateMessage: it is used to initialize the decision maker with preferences and ownership states. It can also be used to update the ownership states in the decision maker if the settlement of transaction takes place.

A message, say msg, is sent to the decision maker like so from any skill: 

self.context.decision_maker_message_queue.put_nowait(msg)

The decision maker processes messages and can accept or reject them.

To process Messages from the decision maker in a given skill you need to create a Handler, in particular a SigningHandler like so:

class SigningHandler(Handler):

    protocol_id = SigningMessage.protocol_id

    def handle(self, message: Message):
        """
        Handle a signing message.

        :param message: the signing message from the decision maker.
        """
        # code to handle the message

Custom DecisionMaker

The framework implements a default DecisionMakerHandler and an advanced DecisionMakerHandler. You can also implement your own and mount it.

No further configuration is needed to use the default. To use the advanced decision maker handler, add the following configuration to the aea-config.yaml of your AEA (on page 1):

decision_maker_handler:
  config: {}
  dotted_path: "aea.decision_maker.gop:DecisionMakerHandler"
  file_path: null

The easiest way to add a custom decision maker handler is to run the following command to scaffold a custom DecisionMakerHandler:

aea scaffold decision-maker-handler

You can then implement your own custom logic to process messages and interact with the Wallet.

Note

For examples how to use these concepts have a look at the tac_ skills. These functionalities are experimental and subject to change.

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