Dealing with time in Content Language expressions

The ability to express temporal conditions, like for example deadlines, is extremely important in agent applications. Nevertheless, communication standards like FIPA ACL do not outline a uniform way to specify such conditions in Content Language expressions. In this paper we extend a CTL*-like temporal language with two very expressive interval operators, and integrate it with a FIPA-compatible representation of dates. We then show, by a number of selected examples, that the resulting language allows agents to express a rich assortment of temporal constraints in a very natural way. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.