An ACL for Specifying Fault-Tolerant Protocols

Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) have been developed to provide a way for agents to communicate with each other supporting cooperation in Multi-Agent Systems. In the past few years many ACLs have been proposed for Multi-Agent Systems and new standards are emerging such as FIPA ACL. Despite these efforts, an important issue in the research on ACLs is still open and concerns how these languages should deal with failures of agents in asynchronous Multi-Agent Systems. In this paper we present an asynchronous ACL which provide high-level mechanisms to deal with crash failures, one-to-many communication primitives and supports a fault-tolerant anonymous interaction protocol. To illustrate the expressive power of the language we show how it can be effectively used for the specification of fault tolerant protocols.