Fault Tolerant Knowledge Level Communication in Open Asynchronous Multi-Agent Systems

Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) have been developed to provide a way for agents to communicate with each other supporting cooperation in Multi-Agent Systems. In the past few years many ACLs have been proposed for Multi-Agent Systems and new standards are emerging such as the FIPA ACL developed by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. Despite these efforts, an important issue in the research on ACLs is still open and concerns how these languages should deal with failures of agents in asynchronous Multi-Agent Systems. The Fault Tolerant Agent Communication Language ( ) presented in this paper addresses this issue. provides high-level fault tolerant communication primitives and support for an anonymous interaction protocol which satisfy a set of well defined knowledge level programming requirements. We present a formal semantics for and a formal specification of the underlying agent architecture. To illustrate the language features we show how can be effectively used to write high-level executable specifications of fault tolerant protocols, such as the Contract Net one. . Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Informazione, University of Bologna, via Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, 40127 Bologna, Italy.