On Commitments Creation, Compliance and Violation

The importance of specifying a standard framework for agent communication languages (ACL) with a clear semantics has been widely recognized. The semantics should be verifiable, clear and practical. We aim, in this paper, to present a clear way of detecting whether or not a commitment is violated. We will define a violation/compliance criterion based on the existence of arguments/proofs for the induced commitment(s). The logic which we shall employ is temporal modal defeasible logic which formalizes commitments that agents undertake as a consequence of communicative actions. A clear meaning in terms of the commitments it induces is associated with each speech. Commitments are represented as modal sentences.