Semantics of Agent Communication Languages for Group Interaction

Abstract

Group communication is the core of societal interactions. Therefore, artificial agents should be able to communicate with groups as well as individuals. However, most contemporary agent communication languages, notably FIPA and KQML, have either no provision or no well-defined semantics for group communication. We give a semantics for group communication that we believe can profitably enrich the agent communication languages. In our semantics, individual 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. Motivation Artificial as well as human agents not only interact with individual agents, but they also need to communicate with groups of agents. We post messages to mailing lists and notice boards