Operational Semantics for Agent Communication Languages

In this paper, we study the operational semantics of agent communication languages.We develop a basic multi-agent programming language for systems of concurrently operating agents, into which agent communication languages can be integrated. In this language, each agent has a mental state comprised of an informational component and a motivational component; interaction between the agents proceeds via a rendezvous communication mechanism. The language builds upon well-understood concepts from the object-oriented programming paradigm as object classes, method invocations and object creation. The formal semantics of the language are de ned by means of transition rules that describe its operational behaviour. Moreover, the operational semantics closely follow the syntactic structure of the language, and hence give rise to an abstract machine to interpret it.