In: Selected Revised and Invited papers of Programming Multi-Agent Systems: First International Workshop, PROMAS 2003, Melbourne, Australia, July 15, 2003, pages 149-168. Volume 3067 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Mehdi Dastani, Juergen Dix, Amal El Fallah-Seghrouchni (Eds.) --- Springer-Verlag, August 2004.
Abstract: Although interaction protocols are often part of multi-agent infrastructures, many of the published protocols are semi-formal, vague or contain errors. Formal presentations can counter such disadvantages since they are amenable to verification of correctness. On the other hand, a diagrammatic representation of system structure is easier to comprehend. To this end, this paper bridges the gap between formal specification and intuitive development by: (1) proposing an extended form of propositional dynamic logic for expressing protocols completely, with clear semantics, that can be converted to a programming language for interaction protocols and (2) developing extended statecharts as a diagrammatic counterpart.