Towards a Formal Theory of Communicationfor

Agents in multiagent systems interact to a large extent by communicating. Such communication may be fruitfully studied from the point of view of speech act theory. In order for mul-tiagent systems to be formally and rigorously designed and analyzed, a semantics of speech acts that gives their objective model-theoretic conditions of satisfaction is needed. However , most research into multiagent systems that deals with communication provides only informal descriptions of the diierent message types used. And this problem is not addressed at all by traditional speech act theory or by AI research into discourse understanding. I provide a formal semantics for the major kinds of speech acts at a level that has not been considered before. The resulting theory applies uniformly to a wide range of multiagent systems. Some applications of this theory are outlined, and some of its theorems listed.