Statecharts: A visual formalism for complex systems
Science of Computer Programming
Communication and cooperation in agent systems: a pragmatic theory
Communication and cooperation in agent systems: a pragmatic theory
Formalising the contract net as a goal-directed system
MAAMAW '96 Proceedings of the 7th European workshop on Modelling autonomous agents in a multi-agent world : agents breaking away: agents breaking away
KAoS: toward an industrial-strength open agent architecture
Software agents
Semantics and conversations for an agent communication language
Readings in agents
Using Formal Description Techniques: An Introduction to Estelle, Lotos, and SDL
Using Formal Description Techniques: An Introduction to Estelle, Lotos, and SDL
Desiderata for agent argumentation protocols
Proceedings of the first international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems: part 1
AgenTalk: Describing Multiagent Coordination Protocols with Inheritance
TAI '95 Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence
Interaction Protocols in Agentis
ICMAS '98 Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Multi Agent Systems
A formal framework for interaction protocol engineering
CEEMAS'05 Proceedings of the 4th international Central and Eastern European conference on Multi-Agent Systems and Applications
Engineering agent conversations with the DIALOG framework
MATES'06 Proceedings of the 4th German conference on Multiagent System Technologies
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Agents interact in the context of a society to exchange knowledge, to cooperate and to coordinate their activities. A standard approach is to describe these interactions as conversations specified by means of interaction protocols (IPs). The set of conversations in which an agent can participate defines its communication interface. Therefore, the standardised sets of IPs that specify these conversations can be viewed as Agent Interface Definitions (AID), just as procedure and function definitions make up programming interfaces (API) in other programming paradigms. This paper presents the abstract syntax and semantics of ACSL: a new formal specification language that can clearly and precisely describe these interfaces so that they can be consumed both by designers and programmers (generally using CASE tools) and automatically by actual agents during interaction. This language fills a gap in the development of agent interface definition languages (AIDL). The paper focuses particularly on the newest features of the language, like (1) protocol composition, (2) protocol exceptions related to the reception of out-of-sequence messages or timeout expirations, (3) compensation protocols that adapt the classical concept of transaction to the autonomy and rationality of agents and, finally, (4) specification of message correlation and causality.