We address the issues of semantics and conversations for agent communication languages and the Knowledge Query Manipulation Language (KQML) in particular. Based on ideas from speech act theory, we present a semantic description for KQML that associates "cognitive" states of the agent with the use of the language's primitives (performatives). Wehave used this approach to describe the semantics for the whole set of reserved KQML performatives. Building on

Introduction Agents operate and exist in some environment, which typically is both computational and physical. The environment might be open or closed, and it might or might not contain other agents. Although there are situations where an agent can operate usefully by itself, the increasing interconnection and networking of computers is making such situations rare, and in the usual state of affairs the agent interacts with other agents. Whereas the previous chapter defined the structure and characteristics of an individual agent, the focus of this chapter is on systems with multiple agents. At times, the number of agents may be too numerous to deal with them individually, and it is then more convenient to deal with them collectively, as a society of agents. In this chapter, we will learn how to analyze, describe, and design environments in which agents can operate effectively and interact with each other productively. The environments will provide a computational infrastructu

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Abstract. We describe our preliminary work in modeling conversation specifications and policies as positive/negative permissions and obligations. Our model is generic as it is independent of the syntax and semantics of the communication language and can be used for different agent communication languages. We also discuss the relationship between conversation specifications and policies and show how both are used by an agent in order to decide what communicative act to perform next within a conversation. Our work is different from existing research in communication policies because it is not tightly coupled to any domain information like the mental states of agents or specific communicative acts.The main contributions of this work include (i) an extensible framework that can support varied domain knowledge and different agent communication languages, and (ii) the declarative representation of conversation specifications and policies in terms of permitted and obligated speech acts. 1

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We propose a new model for agent communication in open systems that is based on the principle that the meaning of communicative acts lies in their experienced consequences. A formal framework for analysing such evolving semantics is defined. An extensive analysis of example interaction processes shows that our framework allows for an assessment of several properties of the communicative conventions governing a multiagent system. Among other advantages, our framework is capable of providing a very straightforward definition of communicative conflict. Also, it allows agents to reason about the e#ects of their communicative behaviour on the structure of communicative expectations as a whole when making decisions.

We describe a meta-logic for characterizing the evolving internal reasoning of various families of agents. We view the reasoning of agents as ongoing processes rather than as fixed sets of conclusions. Our approach utilizes a strongly sorted calculus, distinguishing the application language, time, and various syntactic sorts. We have established soundness and completeness results corresponding to various families of agents. This allows for useful and intuitively natural characterizations of such agents' reasoning abilities. We discuss and contrast consistency issues as in the work of Montague and Thomason. We also show how to represent the concept of focus of attention in this framework. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS9907482. We wish to thank the referees for their valuable comments and suggestions. 1 Keywords: logics of knowledge and beliefs, bounded agents, real-time reasoning, multiple agents. 1 Introduct...

This paper introduces communication systems (CS) as a unified model for socially intelligent systems. This model derived from sociological systems theory, combines the empirical analysis of communication in a social system with logical processing of social information to provide a general framework for computational components that exploit communication processes in multiagent systems.

Summary. Agent technology is widely perceived to be a viable solution for largescale industrial and commercial applications in dynamic environments such as the Internet. However, the lack of rigour and language support in the analysis, specification, design and implementation of multi-agent systems has hampered the wide adoption of agent technology. This paper proposes a model-driven approach to the development of multi-agent systems. It combines graphic modelling with formal specification through automated tools. The paper reports an agent-oriented modelling language CAMLE and the automated tools in its modelling environment. Two aspects of particular importance in the model-driven development methodology are addressed in this paper. The first is the definition and implementation of consistency constraints on graphic models. The second is the automated transformation of graphic models into formal specifications. 1

In this paper, we introduce a formal email workflow model based on traditional email, which enables the user to define and execute ad-hoc workflows in an intuitive way. This model paves the way for semantic annotation of implicit, well-defined workflows, thus making them explicit and exposing the missing information in a machine processable way. Grounding this work within the Social Semantic Desktop [1] via appropriate ontologies means that this information can be exploited for the benefit of the user. This will have a direct impact on their personal information management- given email is not just a major channel of data exchange between desktops, but it also serves as a virtual working environment where people collaborate. Thus the presented workflow model will have a concrete manifestation in the creation, organization and exchange of semantic desktop data.