Towards Multi-Level Semantics for Multi-Agent Systems

In multi-agent systems, changes in an agent's mental state often reflect changes at the social level as well. Furthermore, most work on agent languages use structural operational semantics to formalise multi-agent systems. As multi-agent systems are complex systems, it is difficult to formalise all relevant aspects of such system as a single transition system, and even transition systems for a single agent can easily become cumbersome. In this paper, we propose a particular style of semantic rules that make it visually clearer how changes at one level of a multi-agent system require simultaneous changes in other levels of the system (where each component of each level is modelled as a separate transition system).