Operational Semantics for Agents by Iterated Refinment

In this paper we evaluate transition systems as a tool for providing a rule-based specification of the operational aspects of autonomous agents. By our technique, different aspects of an agent can be analyzed and designed in a loosely coupled way, enabling the possibility of studying their properties in isolation. We take as a use case the Parade framework for building intelligent agents, which leverages a FIPA-like ACL semantics to support semantic interoperability. Our grey-boxing technique is exploited to provide a specification where aspects related to the ACL, the adopted ontology, the agent social role, and the other agent internal details are described separately, in an incremental way.