AGENT COMMUNICATION

• Communication is an important characteristic to support both

coordination and the transfer of information.

• Agents also require the ability to communicate actions or

plans. But how the communication takes place is a function of
its purpose.

Components of communicating agents

Agents communicate in order to understand and be
understood, so it is important to consider the different
dimensions of meaning that are associated with
communication:

• Descriptive vs. Prescriptive : Some messages describe

phenomena, while others prescribe behaviour. Descriptions
are important for human comprehension, but are difficult for
agents to mimic.
• Personal vs. Conventional Meaning : An agent might have its
own meaning for a message, but this might differ from the
meaning conventionally accepted by the other agents with
which the agent communicates.
• Subjective vs. Objective Meaning : Similar to conventional
meaning, where meaning is determined external to an agent,
a message often has an explicit effect on the environment,
which can be perceived objectively.

• Speaker's vs. Hearer's vs. Society's Perspective: Independent

of the conventional or objective meaning of a message, the
message can be expressed according to the viewpoint of the
speaker or hearer or other observers.
• Semantics vs. Pragmatics: The pragmatics of a
communication are concerned with how the communicators
use the communication. This includes considerations of the
mental states of the communicators and the environment in
which they exist, considerations that are external to the
syntax and semantics of the communication

• Cardinality: A message sent privately to one agent would be

understood differently than the same message broadcast
publicly.
• Contextuality: Messages cannot be understood in isolation,
but must be interpreted in terms of the mental states of the
agents, the present state of the environment, and the
environment's history: how it arrived at its present state.

• Coverage: Smaller languages are more manageable, but they

must be large enough so that an agent can convey the
meanings it intends

• Identity: When a communication occurs among agents, its

meaning is dependent on the identities and roles of the
agents involved, and on how the involved agents are
specified.
 MESSAGE TYPES
• There are two basic message types:
1. Assertions
2. Queries.

• In its simplest form, this information is communicated to the

agent from an external source by means of an assertion.

• In order to assume a passive role in a dialog, an agent must

additionally be able to answer questions, i.e., it must be able
to
1) accept a query from an external source and
2) send a reply to the source by making an assertion.
• In order to assume an active role in a dialog, an agent must be
able to issue queries and make assertions.

• With these capabilities, the agent then can potentially control

another agent by causing it to respond to the query or to
accept the information asserted.

• An agent functioning as a peer with another agent can

assume both active and passive roles in a dialog. It must be
able to make and accept both assertions and queries.
 SPEECH ACTS
• Spoken human communication is used as the model for
communication among computational agents. A popular basis
for analyzing human communication is speech act theory.

• Speech act theory views human natural language as actions,

such as requests, suggestions, commitments, and replies. For
example, when you request something, you are not simply
making a statement, but creating the request itself.

• The origin of speech act theories are usually traced to the

work of the philosopher John Austin (1962) then developed
by John Searl (1969).
3 different aspects of speech acts

• Locution, the physical utterance by the speaker

e.g. saying ”please make some tea”

• Illocution, the intended meaning of the utterance by

the speaker
e.g. he requested me to make some tea

• Perlocution, the action that results from the

locution.
e.g. he got me to make tea
KQML (Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language)

• The KQML is an interesting example of communication from a

number of facets. For example, communication requires the
ability to locate and engage a peer in a conversation
(communication layer).

• A method for packaging the messages is then necessary

(messaging layer), and finally an internal format that
represents the messages and is sufficiently expressive to
convey not only information but requests, responses, and
plans (content layer).
• In a network of KQML-speaking agents, there exists programs
to support communication.

• These consist of facilitators that can serve as name servers to

KQML components, and help find other agents that can
satisfy a given agent’s request.

• A KQML router supports the routing of messages and is a

front-end to a specific KQML agent. As KQML was originally
written in Common LISP, it’s message representation follows
the LISP example (balanced parentheses).
• A KQML message can be transferred to any particular
transport (such as sockets) and has a format that consists of a
performative and a set of arguments for that performative.

• The performative defines the speech act which defines the

purpose of the message (assertion, command, request, etc.)

• The performative- name defines the particular message type

to be communicated(evaluate, ask- if, stream-about, reply,
tell, deny, standby, advertise, etc.). The sender and receiver
define the unique names of the agents in the dialogue. The
content is information specific to the performative being
performed.
 KQML Internal Structure
Communication architecture is built around
• facilitators
• routers
• library of interfaces (KRIL)
The structure of a KQML message.
• (performative-name
• : sender X
• : receiver Y
• : content Z
• : language L
• : ontology Y
• : reply-with R
• : in-reply-to Q
• )
KQML is very rich in its ability to communicate
information as well higher-level
request that address the communication layer.
 FIPA ACL

• ACL simply means Agent Communication Language and it was

standardized through the Foundation for Intelligent Physical
Agents consortium.

• As with KQML, ACL is a speech- act language defined by a set

of per formatives.

• The FIPA ACL also uses the Semantic Language, or SL, as the
formal language to define ACL semantics.
• It develops specifications to maximize the portability of agent
systems (including their ability to communicate using the
ACL).

• The FIPA ACL is very similar to the KQML, even adopting the
inner and outer content layering for message construction
(meaning and content).

• The ACL also clarifies certain speech-acts, or performatives.

For example, communication primitives are called
communicative acts, which are separate from the
performative acts.
FIPA ACL Message Structure