Communicating rational agents

Abstract

We demonstrate how communication between agents can be incorporated in a dynamic/epistemic multi-agent system, in which the knowledge and ability of agents, and the opportunity for, and the result of their actions are formalized. We deal with two sorts of communication inside this system: one in which a didactic agent passes on its knowledge to every other agent, and one in which agents only send information upon request. The ability and opportunity to communicate depends on the knowledge and lack of knowledge of agents, and the trust and dependence relations that exist between them. The semantics of communication actions is given by means of the machinery of epistemic updates, which is a useful instrument when modelling knowledge-producing actions. Our approach allows the whole process of communication to be defined inside a Kripke model. We compare our communication system to other multi-agent epistemic notions, viz. belief dependence, and distributed and common knowledge.