Time and defeasibility in FIPA ACL semantics

AbstractInferences about speech acts are often conditional, non-monotonic, and involve the issue of time. Most agent communication languages, however, ignore these issues, due to the difficulty to combine them in a single formalism. This paper addresses such issues in defeasible logic, and shows how to express a semantics for ACLs in order to make non-monotonic inferences on the basis of speech acts

FIPA Communicative Acts in Defeasible Logic

In agent communication languages, the inferences that can be made on the basis of a communicative action are inherently conditional, and non-monotonic. For example, a proposal only leads to a commitment, on the condition that it is accepted. And in a persuasion dialogue, assertions may later be retracted. In this paper we therefore present a defeasible logic that can be used to express a semantics for agent communication languages, and to efficiently make inferences on the basis of communicative actions. The logic is non-monotonic, allows nested rules and mental attitudes as the content of communicative actions, and has an explicit way of expressing persistence over time. Moreover, it expresses that mental attitudes are publicly attributed to agents playing roles in the dialogue. To illustrate the usefulness of the logic, we reformalize the meta-theory underlying the FIPA semantics for agent communication, focusing on inform and propose. We show how composed speech acts can be formalized, and extend the semantics with an account of persuasion

Towards a satisfactory conversion of messages among agent-based information systems

Over the last years, there has been a change of perspective concerning the management of information systems, since they are no longer isolated and need to communicate with others. However, from a semantic point of view, real communication is difficult to achieve due to the heterogeneity of the systems. We present a proposal which, considering information systems are represented by software agents, provides a framework that favors a semantic communication among them, overcoming the heterogeneity of their agent communication languages. The main components of the framework are a suite of ontologies – conceptualizing communication acts – that will be used for generating the communication conversion, and an Event Calculus interpretation of the communications, which will be used for formalizing the notion of a satisfactory conversion. Moreover, we present a motivating example in order to complete the explanation of the whole picture.The work of Idoia Berges was supported by a grant of the Basque Government (Programa de Formación de Investigadores del Departamento de Educación, Universidades e Investigación). This work is also supported the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science TIN2010–21387-C02–01

Reasoning about Communicating Agents in the Semantic Web

Abstract. In this article we interpret the Semantic Web and Web Service issues in the framework of multi-agent interoperating systems. We will advocate the application of results achieved in the research area of reasoning about actions and change by showing scenarios and techniques that could be applied.

Tracking reliability and helpfulness in agent interactions

A critical aspect of open systems such as the Internet is the interactions amongst the component agents of the system. Often this interaction is organised around social principles, in that one agent may request the help of another, and in turn may make a commitment to assist another when requested. In this paper we investigate two measures of the social responsibility of an agent known as reliability and helpfulness. Intuitively, reliability measures how good an agent is at keeping its commitments, and helpfulness measures how willing an agent is to make a commitment, when requested for help. We discuss these notions in the context of FIPA protocols. It is important to note that these measures are dependent only on the messages exchanged between the agents, and do not make any assumptions about the internal organisation of the agents. This means that these measures are both applicable to any variety of software agent, and externally verifiable, i.e. able to be calculated by anyone with access to the messages exchanged

Proceedings of The Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organisations Federated Workshops (MALLOW 2010)

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-627/allproceedings.pdfInternational audienceMALLOW-2010 is a third edition of a series initiated in 2007 in Durham, and pursued in 2009 in Turin. The objective, as initially stated, is to "provide a venue where: the cost of participation was minimum; participants were able to attend various workshops, so fostering collaboration and cross-fertilization; there was a friendly atmosphere and plenty of time for networking, by maximizing the time participants spent together"