On Agent Programming Language Support for Rational Communication

Résumé : It is generally thought that agents in a multiagent system should be capable of communicating in a highlevel, speech acts-based, agent communication language (ACL), for instance FIPA ACL. Many agent programming languages (APLs) such as Jack, JASON, JADE, etc., support communication in such ACLs, i.e., the production and reception/processing of ACL messages. They also support the specification of complex behaviors for agents, typically by allowing the definition of a library of hierarchical plans that are selected and executed at run time based on external or internal events. However, rational communication requires more than the ability to send and receive ACL messages ; the agent should understand the semantics and pragmatics of the associated communication acts. Without this, agents can only interact when they follow rigid protocols, which is difficult in open systems. Most APLs do not support any of this. In this paper, we argue that this is a serious deficiency that needs to be addressed and discuss the requirements for this. There is one tool that does support the processing of FIPA ACL message semantics and pragmatics, the JADE Semantic Add-On (JSA). But, JSA provides only limited support for the specification of complex agent behaviors. To gain a better understanding of the problem, we explore how one could combine JSA-like semantics and pragmatics processing capabilities with the complex behavior specification capabilities of a typical APL.