Agent communication language: Towards a semantics based on success, satisfaction, and recursion

Searle and Vanderveken's model of speech acts is undoubtedly an adequate model for the design of communicating agents because it offers a rich theory which can give important properties of protocols that we can formalize properly. We examine this theory by focusing on the two fundamentals notions, success and satisfaction, which represent a systematic, unified account of both the truth and the success conditional aspects. Then, we propose an adequate formalism-the situation calculus-for representing these two notions (in a recursive way) in the context of agent communication language. The resulting framework is finally used for (1) the analysis and interpretation of speech acts; (2) the semantics and descriptions of agent communication languages.