Towards a Unified View of the Environment(s) within Multi-Agent Systems

Within the Multi-agent systems (MASs) paradigm, the concept of the environment plays a central role. In fact, the autonomous agents do only exist when they are deployed on an environment. Still, there is an implicit hypothesis in current trends of the MASs considering that the agents are related to only one environment that captures all the different aspects of the application domain. In this paper we challenge this implicit hypothesis by enabling multiple occurrences of the agent-environment relationship. This brings clarity and modularity for the design and implementation of complex MASs since each environment targets a specific aspect of the application. Thanks to the proposed characterization of the agent-environment relationship, the agents are still offered a unified view about all the environments.

keywords   MASs, environment, multi-environments

origin event

 Special Issue “Hot Topics in European Agent Research I”

 AL3-TF2

journal or series

 Informatica (Informatica)

container publication

 Special Issue “Hot Topics in European Agent Research I” (special issue, 2005) — Andrea Omicini, Paolo Petta, Matjaz Gams

companion publication

 The Second AgentLink III Technical Forum: Main Issues and Hot Topics in European Agent Research (editorial/introduction/preface, 2005) — Andrea Omicini, Paolo Petta, Matjaz Gams

 An Overview of Current Trends in European AOSE Research (article in journal, 2005) — Carole Bernon, Massimo Cossentino, Juan Pavón

 Agent Modeling Language (AML): A Comprehensive Approach to Modeling MAS (article in journal, 2005) — Ivan Trencansky, Radovan Cervenka

 The Tropos Metamodel and its Use (article in journal, 2005) — Angelo Susi, Anna Perini, John Mylopoulos, Paolo Giorgini

 On the Role of Environments in Multiagent Systems (article in journal, 2005) — Danny Weyns, Tom Holvoet

 Coordination Artifacts: A Unifying Abstraction for Engineering Environment-Mediated Coordination in MAS (article in journal, 2005) — Alessandro Ricci, Mirko Viroli

funding project

 AgentLink III — A Coordination Network for Agent-based Computing (01/01/2004–31/01/2006)

companion publication for

 Coordination Artifacts: A Unifying Abstraction for Engineering Environment-Mediated Coordination in MAS (article in journal, 2005) — Alessandro Ricci, Mirko Viroli

 Agent Modeling Language (AML): A Comprehensive Approach to Modeling MAS (article in journal, 2005) — Ivan Trencansky, Radovan Cervenka

 The Second AgentLink III Technical Forum: Main Issues and Hot Topics in European Agent Research (editorial/introduction/preface, 2005) — Andrea Omicini, Paolo Petta, Matjaz Gams

 The Tropos Metamodel and its Use (article in journal, 2005) — Angelo Susi, Anna Perini, John Mylopoulos, Paolo Giorgini

 On the Role of Environments in Multiagent Systems (article in journal, 2005) — Danny Weyns, Tom Holvoet

 An Overview of Current Trends in European AOSE Research (article in journal, 2005) — Carole Bernon, Massimo Cossentino, Juan Pavón