  Within Multi Agent Systems, communication by means of Agent Communication
Languages (ACLs) has a key role to play in the co-operation, co-ordination and
knowledge-sharing between agents. Despite this, complex reasoning about agent
messaging, and specifically about conversations between agents, tends not to
have widespread support amongst general-purpose agent programming languages.
  ACRE (Agent Communication Reasoning Engine) aims to complement the existing
logical reasoning capabilities of agent programming languages with the
capability of reasoning about complex interaction protocols in order to
facilitate conversations between agents. This paper outlines the aims of the
ACRE project and gives details of the functioning of a prototype implementation
within the Agent Factory multi agent framework.
