Résumé : It is generally thought that agents in a multiagent sys-tem should be capable of communicating in a high-level, speech acts-based, agent communication language (ACL), for instance FIPA ACL. Many agent program-ming languages (APLs) such as Jack, JASON, JADE, etc., support communication in such ACLs, i.e., the pro-duction and reception/processing of ACL messages. They also support the
... [Show full abstract] specification of complex behaviors for agents, typically by allowing the definition of a library of hierarchical plans that are selected and executed at run time based on external or internal events. However, ra-tional communication requires more than the ability to send and receive ACL messages ; the agent should un-derstand the semantics and pragmatics of the associated communication acts. Without this, agents can only in-teract when they follow rigid protocols, which is diffi-cult in open systems. Most APLs do not support any of this. In this paper, we argue that this is a serious defi-ciency that needs to be addressed and discuss the require-ments for this. There is one tool that does support the pro-cessing of FIPA ACL message semantics and pragmat-ics, the JADE Semantic Add-On (JSA). But, JSA pro-vides only limited support for the specification of com-plex agent behaviors. To gain a better understanding of the problem, we explore how one could combine JSA-like se-mantics and pragmatics processing capabilities with the complex behavior specification capabilities of a typical APL.