Semantics of Agent Communication: An Introduction

  • Authors:

  • Rogier M. van Eijk

  • Affiliations:

  • -

  • Venue:
  • Selected papers from the UKMAS Workshop on Foundations and Applications of Multi-Agent Systems
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Communication has been one of the salient issues in the research on concurrent and distributed systems. This holds no less for the research on multiagent systems. Over the last few years the study of agent communication, and in particular the semantics of agent communication, has attracted increased interest. The present paper provides an introduction to this area. Since agent communication builds upon concepts and techniques from concurrencytheory, we start bygi ving a short historical overview that covers shared-variable concurrency, message-passing, rendezvous, concurrent constraint programming and agent communication. Standard approaches of agent communication identifythree different layers: a content layer, message layer and communication layer. To this model we add an extra level, namely the layer of the multi-agent system. Subsequently, we discern three approaches in developing the semantics of programming languages: the axiomatic, operational and denotational approach. Additionally, we discuss semantic aspects of agent communication, including communication histories, compositionality, observable behaviour, failure sets and full abstractness. We illustrate these issues bymeans of the framework ACPL (Agent Communication Programming Language). Finally, we briefly consider the specification and verification of agent communication.