Extending the Operational Semantics of a BDI Agent-Oriented Programming Language for Introducing Speech-Act Based Communication

Work on agent communication languages has since long striven to achieve adequate speech act semantics; partly, the problem is that references to an agent’s architecture (in particular a BDI-like architecture) would be required in giving such semantics more rigorously. On the other hand, BDI agent-oriented programming languages have had their semantics formalised for an abstract versions only, neglecting “practical” aspects such as communication primitives; this means that, at least in what concerns communication, implementations of BDI programming languages have been ad hoc. This paper tackles, however preliminarily, both these problems by giving semantics to speech-act based messages received by an AgentSpeak(L) agent. AgentSpeak(L) is a BDI, agentoriented, logic programming language that has received a great deal of attention in recent years. The work in this paper builds upon a structural operational semantics to AgentSpeak(L) that we have given in previous work. The contribut...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: DALT
• Authors: Álvaro F. Moreira, Renata Vieira, Rafael H. Bordini
• Keywords: Agent Communication Languages, DALT 2003, Programming Language, Semantics