Abstract

. The continuing expansion of distributed intelligent systems makes new demands on theories of communication in Computer Science. It is customary to describe the individual nodes or agents in an intelligent system in terms of higher level concepts like intentions, know-how and beliefs. However, current theories of the communication among such agents provide no form of a formal or rigorous semantics for the messages exchanged at a corresponding level of abstraction--- they either concern themselves with implementational details or address what is, for artificial systems, an irrelevant aspect of the problem. A recent theory of communication that gives the objective model-theoretic semantics for speech acts is applied to this problem. This allows the important properties of protocols to be formalized abstractly, i.e., at the level of the application, not of the implementation. Further constraints on "good" designs can also be stated, which simplify the requirements imposed on the member a...

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