DA A AD A : Towards a Cognitive Use of Artifacts in MAS

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Michele Piunti

Résumé : Recent approaches in Multi-Agent Systems are focusing on models and methodologies for the design of environments and system facilities supposed to ease programming in the large and scale up complexities. Among others, the Agents and Artifacts (A&A) approach introduces the notion af artifact as first class abstraction -- dual to the one provided by agents. Artifacts represent, in A&A terms, non autonomous computational entities and external resources providing agents with serviceable operations, additional information and coordination facilities explicitely conceived by the MAS designer for easing agents tasks. Based on the Agents and Artifacts (A&A) conceptual model, the CARTAGO framework allow the design and development of multi-agent environments in terms of open set of artifacts, collected in workspaces, that agents dynamically instantiate, share and use to support their individual and collective works. But, once the artifact based infrastructure has been enabled, we still need agents with new capabiities for interaction to use it. Among the topics planned in the talk:

  • the integration of CARTAGO with heterogeneous agent platforms - Jason, JADEX, simpA will be touched in particular - enabling in the overall the development and execution of open and heterogeneous MAS;
  • the issue of goal-oriented and goal-directed use of artifacts, towards MAS with intelligent agents reasoning about the artifacts to select and use to achieve their goals and/or adapting their computational environment (e.g. by creating new artifacts, linking and manipulating existing ones).
  • The discussion on the functional role played by artifacts once they are employed in the context of societies of cognitve agents, i.e. agents capable to reason about their epistemic and motivational states.

Some of the outcomes of the described approaches will be discussed along with test cases showing agents engaged in goal-oriented activities relying on the transmission of relevant knowledge and the operations provided by artifacts.