Communication in Multiagent Systems

Agents in multiagent systems are concurrent autonomous entities that need to coordinate and to cooperate so as to perform their tasks; these coordination and cooperation tasks might be achieved through communication. Communication, also called interaction by some authors, thus represents one of the major topics in multiagent systems.

The state of the art of research on communication in multiagent systems is presented in this book. First, three seminal papers by Cohen and Perrault, by Singh, and by Davis and Smith present background information and introduce the newcomer to the area. The main part of the book is devoted to current research work dealing with agent communication, communication for coordination and argumentation, protocols, and dialogue games and conversational agents. Finally, the last paper deals with the future of agent communication.

Inhalt

Background.- Elements of a Plan-Based Theory of Speech Acts.- Agent Communication Languages: Rethinking the Principles.- Negotiation as a Metaphor for Distributed Problem Solving.- Current Trends.- Verification and Compliance Testing.- Process Algebra for Agent Communication: A General Semantic Approach.- Hierarchical Information Combination in Large-Scale Multiagent Resource Management.- A Perspective on Multiagent Coordination Models.- Argumentation-Based Communication between Agents.- Interaction Protocol Engineering.- An Organisational Approach to the Design of Interaction Protocols.- Design Agent Interaction as a Service to Agents.- A FIPA Compliant Goal Delegation Protocol.- Communication for Goal Directed Agents.- When Are Two Protocols the Same?.- Dialogue Game Protocols.- Request for Action Reconsidered as a Dialogue Game Based on Commitments.- Computational Model of Believable Conversational Agents.- Future.- The Future of Agent Communication.