Communication Protocols in Multi-agent Systems: A Development Method and Reference Architecture

Abstract

The meaning of a communicative act in a multi-agent system can be characterised at a number of different levels. We argue that only one level of meaning is common across all applications: what we call the action-level semantics given by protocols or conversation policies. We define a general semantic framework for specifying the semantics of a class of Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) based on protocols. We then introduce sACL, a small ACL, and show how the action-level semantics of this language can be integrated with an intentional semantics. This enables us to specify the meaning of an individual communicative act in the context of the conversation in which it occurs, and to customise sACL for different application domains. We describe a development method for defining an ACL for a particular application, and give a reference architecture for the method using the Beliefs-Desires-Intentions (BDI) agent architecture.