{"ID":2823392,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00219","arxiv_id":"2601.00219","title":"μACP: A Formal Calculus for Expressive, Resource-Constrained Agent Communication","abstract":"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.","short_abstract":"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 expre...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00219","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00219v2","authors":"[\"Arnab Mallick\",\"Indraveni Chebolu\"]","published":"2026-01-01T05:50:32Z","proceeding":"cs.MA","tasks":"[\"cs.MA\",\"cs.NI\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}