Modeling agent conversations with colored petri nets

Conversations are a useful means of structuring communica- tive interactions among agents. The value of a conversation- based approach is largely determined by the conversational model it uses. Finite State Machines, used heavily to date for this purpose, are not sucient for complex agent inter- actions requiring a notion of concurrency. We propose the use of Colored Petri Nets as a model underlying a language for conversation specication. This carries the relative sim- plicity and graphical representation of the former approach, along with greater expressive power and support for con- currency. The construction of such a language, Protolin- gua, is currently being investigated within the framework of the Jackal agent development environment. In this paper, we explore the use of Colored Petri Nets in modeling agent communicative interaction