An ACL for a Dynamic System of Agents
Mauro Gáspari · Computational Intelligence · 2002
In this article we present the design of an ACL for a dynamic system of agents. The ACL includes a set of conversation performatives extended with operations to register, create, and terminate agents. The main design goal at the agent–level is to provide only knowledge–level primitives that are well integrated with the dynamic nature of the system. This goal has been achieved by defining an anonymous interaction protocol which enables agents to request and supply knowledge without considering symbol–level issues concerning management of agent names, routing, and agent reachability. This anonymous interaction protocol exploits a distributed facilitator schema which is hidden at the agent–level and provides mechanisms for registering capabilities of agents and delivering requests according to the competence of agents. We present a formal specification of the ACL and of the underlying architecture, exploiting an algebra of actors, and illustrate it with the help of a graphical notation. This approach provides the basis for discussing dynamic primitives in ACL and for studying properties of dynamic multi agent systems, for example concerning the behavior of agents and the correctness of their conversation policies.