A social ACL semantics by deontic constraints

Abstract

In most proposals for multi-agent systems, an Agent Communication Language (ACL) is the formalism designed to express knowledge exchange among agents. However, a universally accepted standard for ACLs is still missing. Among the different approaches to the definition of ACL semantics, the social approach seems the most appropriate to express semantics of communication in open societies of autonomous and heterogeneous agents. In this paper we propose a formalism (deontic constraints) to express social ACL semantics, which can be grounded on a computational logic framework, thus allowing automatic verification of compliance by means of appropriate proof procedures. We also show how several common communication performatives can be defined by means of deontic constraints.