Augmenting Agent Platforms to Facilitate Conversation Reasoning
David Lillis and Rem W. Collier
In M. Dastani, A. E. F. Seghrouchni, J. F. Hübner, and J. Leite, editors, Languages, Methodologies, and Development Tools for Multi-Agent Systems - Third International Workshop, LADS 2010, Lyon, France, August 30 - September 2010, Revised Selected Papers, volume 6822 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 56--75. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011.
Abstract
Within Multi Agent Systems, communication by means of Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) has a key role to play in the co-operation, co-ordination and knowledge-sharing between agents. De- spite this, complex reasoning about agent messaging, and specifically about conversations between agents, tends not to have widespread support amongst general-purpose agent programming languages. ACRE (Agent Communication Reasoning Engine) aims to complement the existing logical reasoning capabilities of agent programming languages with the capability of reasoning about complex interaction protocols in order to facilitate conversations between agents. This paper outlines the aims of the ACRE project and gives details of the functioning of a prototype implementation within the Agent Factory multi agent framework.