Compositional modelling of reflective agents

In this paper, a compositional model for reflective agents is proposed with in which reasoning about observation, assumption making and communication, an agent's own information state and reasoning processes, other agents' inf ormation states and reasoning processes, and combinations of these types of reflective reasoning are explicitly modelled. The types of knowledge neede d to detect, analyse and resolve conflicts that arise by meta-reasoning wit hin the agent are discussed. The knowledge and interaction between agents r equired to model the wise men's puzzle is used to illustrate the approach. The model has been validated using think-aloud protocols. An implementation has been made including a speech synthesis facility. (C) 1999 Academic Pre ss.