A Commitment-based Communicative Act Library

The Agent Communication Language (ACL) proposed by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) is the most complete attempt to create a universally accepted standard so far. Nevertheless, this standard shows some shortcomings which are probably hindering an even greater impact upon the scientific research dealing with multiagent systems. Although agreeing with the mainstream view that analyzes agent communication in terms of communicative acts, we part from FIPA's assumptions about the semantics, as we shift the focus from affecting communicating agents' mental states to modifying the commitments binding them to each other. We show that our commitment-based framework is powerful enough to allow for the main FIPA communicative acts and provides a semantics which overcomes some of the problems that are currently affecting the standard.