Agents in multiagent systems are concurrent autonomous entities that need to coordinate

and to cooperate so as to perform their tasks (buying items on the Internet or

retrieving information, for instance). These coordination and cooperation tasks might

be achieved through communication. Communication (also called ‘interaction’ by some

authors) represents one of the main elements in multiagent systems. Without communication,

agents will not be able to exchange information or coordinate with each other.

Research on communication has been an established field for at least 20 years and

moved from early work on protocols to direct agent communication, to communication

that encompasses some human conversation patterns. Between these two points,

several areas are considered in agent communication: agent communication languages,

coordination, argumentation, negotiation and dialogue games, to name a few.