Although everyone recognizes communication as a central concept in multiagents,
many no longer see agent communication as a research topic. Unfortunately
there seems to be a tendency to regard communication as a kind of
information exchange that can easily be covered using the standard FIPA ACL.
However, the papers in this volume show that research in agent communication
is far from finished. If we want to develop the full potential of multi-agent systems,
agent communication should also develop to a level beyond parameter or
value passing as is done in OO approaches!
In this book we present the latest collection of papers around the topic of
agent communication. The collection comprises of the best papers from the agent
communication workshops of 2005 and 2006, enriched with a few revised agent
communication papers from the AAMAS conference. Due to some unfortunate
circumstances the proceedings of the 2005 workshop were delayed, but it gave
us the opportunity to join the best papers of the 2006 edition to this volume.
Together these papers give a very good overview of the state of the art in this
area of research and give a good indication of the topics that are of major interest
at the moment.
The papers are divided into the following four topics:
– Semantics of Agent Communication
– Commitments in Agent Communication
– Protocols and Strategies
– Reliability and Overhearing