Building Semantic Agents in eXAT

This paper describes the FIPA-ACL semantics sup- port provided by eXAT, an Erlang-based FIPA-compliant agent platform, developed by the authors, which uses the Erlang language to offer a complete environment for the realization of the behavioral, intelligent and social parts of an agent. eXAT agents can thus exploit a FSM-based abstraction for the behavioral part and an Erlang-based rule processing engine (with its own knowledge base) for the implementation of agent's reasoning process. In this architecture, a SL Semantics Layer is introduced to support FIPA-ACL semantics; such a module is activated during messaging and is able to automatically check and perform the feasibility precondition and rational effect relevant to the communicative act sent or received. This is performed by manipulating the knowledge base of the inference engines of the sender/receiver agent, by checking for the presence of suitable facts and/or asserting other facts, according to FIPA- ACL semantics specification. ACL semantics handling is also enriched with a reasoning module, charged with the task of providing an "higher-level" messaging, based on agent actions— rather than messages—that, after a semantics-aware reasoning process, are transformed into communicative acts.

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