Parla: A Cooperation Language for Cognitive Multi-Agent Systems

. One of the main goals of Distributed Artificial Intelligence is to devise methods to join a community of Computational Agents into a Multi-Agent System, where these agents can cooperate to reach common goals. Cooperation in a Cognitive Agent community is usually supported by an Agent Communication Language (ACL) which allows the agents to exchange knowledge and information through a computer network. In this paper, we propose Parla, a high level agent communication language to cognitive multi-agent systems. This language is based on a standard message format, that contains the necessary information for the message integrity, network security and groupware services to be implemented. These services can either be performed by the lower layers of the system or be included in the high level agent communication support. This message format has a specific slot to store the cooperation language expressions. These expressions consist of a primitive name and an argument, which should be a va..