The Z notation: a reference manual
The Z notation: a reference manual
Communications of the ACM
Fundamentals of Algebraic Specification I
Fundamentals of Algebraic Specification I
Agent Communication Languages: The Current Landscape
IEEE Intelligent Systems
Semantics for an Agent Communication Language
ATAL '97 Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Intelligent Agents IV, Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages
Interaction Protocols in Agentis
ICMAS '98 Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Multi Agent Systems
Verifiable Semantics for Agent Communication Languages
ICMAS '98 Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Multi Agent Systems
A protocol-based semantics for an agent communication language
IJCAI'99 Proceedings of the 16th international joint conference on Artifical intelligence - Volume 1
Syntax, semantics and pragmatics in communication
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Semantic Systems
Broadening the semantic coverage of agent communicative acts
AOIS'05 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Agent-Oriented Information Systems III
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
It is well recognized that Agent Communication Languages (ACL's) are a critical element of Multi-Agent Systems and a key to their successful application in commerce and industry. The field of protocol engineering, which addresses the problems of specifying and verifying machine communication languages and testing implementations, has developed powerful theoretical and automated techniques for doing this, and more importantly, a mature understanding of the requirements that communication language and protocol specifications should meet. Unfortunately, those developing and promulgating ACL's appear not to have taken advantage of this body of knowledge. An examination of the current ACL specifications being developed by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) reveals a confusing amalgam of different formal and informal specification techniques whose net result is ambiguous, inconsistent and certainly under-specified. Allowances must be made, as these are draft specifications, but rather than providing a verified foundation for reliable communication between heterogeneous agents, they seem likely to lead to a host of unreliable and incompatible implementations, or to be ignored in favour of more pragmatic and robust approaches. In this paper, we propose a set of requirements against which an ACL specification can be judged, briefly explore some of the shortcomings of the FIPA ACL and their origins, and contrast it with a small ACL which was designed with reliability and ease of verification as prime objectives.