Semantics of Communicating Agents Based on Deduction and Abduction

Intelligent agents in the agent language 3APL are computational entities consisting of beliefs and goals which make up their mental state. In this paper, we integrate communication at the agent level into the language 3APL. Communication at the agent level consists of communication between agents of their beliefs and goals. We propose two pairs of communication primitives for agent level communication. The semantics of these primitives are based on two distinct types of reasoning: deduction and abduction. Deduction serves to derive information from a received message. Abduction serves to obtain proposals in reply to requests. We illustrate the use of these communication primitives for agents by an implementation of a multi-stage negotiation protocol. We also discuss the relation of our approach to approaches to communication based on speech act theory.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: AGENTCL
• Authors: Koen V. Hindriks, Frank S. de Boer, Wiebe van der Hoek, John-Jules Ch. Meyer
• Keywords: Agent Level, AGENTCL 2000, Communication, Communication Primitives, Intelligent Agents