First Order Action Logic - an Approach for Modelling the Communication Process between Agents

In the design of information systems, the notion of agent has proven useful. When modelling communication among agents, deontic concepts, such as obligations, permissions, and prohibitions are essential. The dynamics of obligations, i.e., how obligations are created and destroyed, can effectively be described by means of notions from speech act theory. In this paper, we present a language that includes deontic and illocutionary constructs for the modelling of communication between agents. The language is a logic programming language, which gives it a simple semantics and makes it executable. A distinguishing feature of the language is that it is able to represent time explicitly, which is required to give an adequate semantics for deontic constructs.