Semantics of Agent Communication Languages for Group Interaction

Group communication is the core of societal interactions. Therefore, artificial agents should be able to communicate with groups as well as individuals. However, most contemporary agent communication languages, notably FIPA and KQML, have either no provision or no well-defined semantics for group communication. We give semantics for group communication that we believe can profitably enrich the agent communication languages. In our semantics, individual communication is a special case of group communication wherein each communicating group consists of a single agent.