Communication in Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication Languages and Conversation Policies

Agents in multiagent systems are concurrent autonomous entities that need to coordinate and to cooperate so as to perform their tasks; these coordination and cooperation tasks might be achieved through communication. Communication, also called interaction by some authors, thus represents one of the major topics in multiagent systems.

This book presents the state of the art of research on communication in multiagent systems. First, three seminal papers by Cohen and Perrault, by Singh, and by Davis and Smith present background information and introduce the newcomer to the area. The main part of the book is devoted to current research work dealing with agent communication, communication for coordination and argumentation, protocols, and dialogue games and conversational agents. Finally, the last paper deals with the future of agent communication.