μACP: A Formal Calculus for Expressive, Resource-Constrained Agent Communication
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arXiv
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| Auteurs principaux: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866911714962833408 |
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| author | Mallick, Arnab Chebolu, Indraveni |
| author_facet | Mallick, Arnab Chebolu, Indraveni |
| contents | Agent communication remains a foundational problem in multi-agent systems: protocols such as FIPA-ACL guarantee semantic richness but are intractable for constrained environments, while lightweight IoT protocols achieve efficiency at the expense of expressiveness. This paper presents $μ$ACP, a formal calculus for expressive agent communication under explicit resource bounds. We formalize the Resource-Constrained Agent Communication (RCAC) model, prove that a minimal four-verb basis \textit{\{PING, TELL, ASK, OBSERVE\}} is suffices to encode finite-state FIPA protocols, and establish tight information-theoretic bounds on message complexity. We further show that $μ$ACP can implement standard consensus under partial synchrony and crash faults, yielding a constructive coordination framework for edge-native agents. Formal verification in TLA$^{+}$ (model checking) and Coq (mechanized invariants) establishes safety and boundedness, and supports liveness under modeled assumptions. Large-scale system simulations confirm ACP achieves a median end-to-end message latency of 34 ms (95th percentile 104 ms) at scale, outperforming prior agent and IoT protocols under severe resource constraints. The main contribution is a unified calculus that reconciles semantic expressiveness with provable efficiency, providing a rigorous foundation for the next generation of resource-constrained multi-agent systems. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_00219 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | μACP: A Formal Calculus for Expressive, Resource-Constrained Agent Communication Mallick, Arnab Chebolu, Indraveni Multiagent Systems Networking and Internet Architecture Agent communication remains a foundational problem in multi-agent systems: protocols such as FIPA-ACL guarantee semantic richness but are intractable for constrained environments, while lightweight IoT protocols achieve efficiency at the expense of expressiveness. This paper presents $μ$ACP, a formal calculus for expressive agent communication under explicit resource bounds. We formalize the Resource-Constrained Agent Communication (RCAC) model, prove that a minimal four-verb basis \textit{\{PING, TELL, ASK, OBSERVE\}} is suffices to encode finite-state FIPA protocols, and establish tight information-theoretic bounds on message complexity. We further show that $μ$ACP can implement standard consensus under partial synchrony and crash faults, yielding a constructive coordination framework for edge-native agents. Formal verification in TLA$^{+}$ (model checking) and Coq (mechanized invariants) establishes safety and boundedness, and supports liveness under modeled assumptions. Large-scale system simulations confirm ACP achieves a median end-to-end message latency of 34 ms (95th percentile 104 ms) at scale, outperforming prior agent and IoT protocols under severe resource constraints. The main contribution is a unified calculus that reconciles semantic expressiveness with provable efficiency, providing a rigorous foundation for the next generation of resource-constrained multi-agent systems. |
| title | μACP: A Formal Calculus for Expressive, Resource-Constrained Agent Communication |
| topic | Multiagent Systems Networking and Internet Architecture |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00219 |