A Fault Tolerant Agent Communication Language for Supporting Web Agent Interaction

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 some standards emerged such as FIPA ACL or KQML. 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. The Fault Tolerant ACL presented in this paper addresses this issue providing knowledge-level fault tolerant communication primitives. To illustrate the potentiality of our ACL, we show how it can be effectively used to support fault tolerant Web agent interaction in common Web Service usage scenarios.

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