Declarative representations of multiagent systems

This paper explores the specification and semantics of multiagent problem-solving systems, focusing on the representations that agents have of each other. It provides a declarative representation for such systems. Several procedural solutions to a well-known test-bed problem are considered, and the requirements they impose on different agents are identified. A study of these requirements yields a representational scheme based on temporal logic for specifying the acting, perceiving, communicating, and reasoning abilities of computational agents. A formal semantics is provided for this scheme. The resulting representation is highly declarative, and useful for describing systems of agents solving problems reactively