Specifying Agent Communication Languages

The goal of standardisation in open agent systems is to facilitate interoperabil-ity between heterogenous agents. This has been the motivation for developing a standard Agent Communication Language (ACL). Experience has shown that de-velopers will adopt their own solutions when the standard ACL does not fit their needs, resulting in a dialect which is not understood in open systems. We contend that there is a need for a standard way of specifying semantics rather than a stan-dard ACL. Our solution is to develop a specification language for ACLs which will allow developers to create their own languages in a standard way. In particular this thesis describes: • A computational model for multi-agent systems which can represent the ob-servable social states of the system including the mental attitudes expressed through communication. • An agent communication framework which allows agent communication to be given a high level declarative semantics which is grounded in the compu