Semantics of Agent Communication Languages for Group Interaction

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 17

Agents

Group communication is the core of societal interactions. Therefore, artificial agents should be able to communicate with groups as well as individuals. However, most contem-porary agent communication languages, notably FIPA and KQML, have either no provision or no well-defined seman-tics for group communication. We give a semantics for group communication that we believe can profitably enrich the agent communication languages. In our semantics, indi-vidual communication is a special case of group communication wherein each communicating group consists of a single agent. One of the novel features of this semantics is that it allows senders to send messages even without knowing all the potential recipients of those messages -- a typical scenario in broadcast communication.