Cognitive Use of Artifacts: Exploiting Relevant Information Residing in MAS Environments

Besides using language and direct communication, humans adopt various kind of artifacts as effective means to represent, store and share information, and finally support knowledge-based cooperation in complex work environments. Similarly to the human case, we argue that an analogous concept can be effective also in the context of multi-agent systems (MAS) when cognitive agents are of concern. In particular, we investigate the use of cognitive artifacts, as those computational entities designed to store, process and make available environmental resources which are relevant to achieve goals and coordinate their cooperative and distributed activities. Some of the practical benefits of the artifact based approach are discussed through an experiment based on CARTAGO and Jason technologies. Effectiveness of different interaction strategies are investigated for teams of goal-oriented agents using different kind of comunication styles.