A Multi-level Approach to the Formal Semantics of Agent Societies

Abstract

Typically, an agent society is composed of at least three main components, namely, the set of its individual agents, the set of multi-agent organisations that help coordinate the actions of those agents, and the environment that those agents share. However, other levels have also been pointed out in the agent society literature, for example, the internal normative systems that regulate the structure and operation of the organisations themselves and, more generally, the overarching cultural system of the society. Many types of formal semantics for such systems, such as for example operational semantics, are not immediately suitable for systems that have ongoing operations at several architectural levels and requiring that those levels synchronise when particular events occur. This paper addresses this problem by proposing an approach to giving formal semantics to multi-level agent societies. The approach allows for the reuse of existing semantics for the separate levels, improves readability, and reduces the number of inference rules to be written.