Informatica 29(4), pages 409–421
November 2005
For a long time, the role of the environment has been underestimated in multiagent systems research. Originating from research on behavior-based agents and situated multiagent systems, the importance of the environment is now gradually being accepted in the multiagent system community in general. In this paper, we elaborate on the role of environments in multiagent systems. We present a model for multiagent systems that puts forward agents and the environment as first-order abstractions. Starting from this model, we elaborate on the logical functionalities of the environment. Competence in engineering environments is a prerequisite to apply environments in practical multiagent system applications. We briefly discuss how current agent-oriented methodologies deal with the environment, and we discuss an approach for engineering environments that puts forward artifacts as building blocks for environments. After that we present the concern-based approach for engineering environments developed in our research group. This approach models the environment as a set of modules that represent different functional concerns of the environment. We illustrate how we have applied this approach in a real-world multiagent system application. The paper concludes with a number of research challenges that are important for the further exploration of environments for multiagent systems.
keywords
multiagent systems, environment, engineering environments
origin event
journal or series
container publication
companion publication
funding project
AgentLink III — A Coordination Network for Agent-based Computing
(01/01/2004–31/01/2006)
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companion publication for
Informatica (Informatica)
Special Issue “Hot Topics in European Agent Research I” (special issue, 2005) — Andrea Omicini, Paolo Petta, Matjaz Gams