Agent-Environment Interaction in MAS - Introduction and Survey
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paper_title: Artificial life meets entertainment: lifelike autonomous agents

paper_content:

The relatively new field of artificial life attempts to study and understand biological life by synthesizing artificial life forms. To paraphrase Chris Langton, the founder of the field, the goal of artificial life is to “model life as it could be so as to understand life as we know it.” Artificial life is a very broad discipline which spans such diverse topics as artificial evolution, artificial ecosystems, artificial morphogenesis, molecular evolution, and many more. Langton offers a nice overview of the different research questions studied by the discipline [6]. Artificial life shares with artificial intelligence (AI) its interest in synthesizing adaptive autonomous agents. Autonomous agents are computational systems that inhabit some complex, dynamic environment, sense and act autonomously in this environment, and by doing so realize a set of goals or tasks for which they are designed.
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paper_title: Modeling Agents and Their Environment: the Physical Environment

paper_content:

Without an environment, an agent is effectively useless. Cut off from the rest of its world, the agent can neither sense nor act. An environment provides the conditions under which an entity (agent or object) can exist. It defines the properties of the world in which an agent will function. Designing effective agents requires careful consideration of both the physical and communicational aspects of their environment. This paper is the first of two part and deals with the physical environment aspect of agents.
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paper_title: Environment as a first class abstraction in multiagent systems

paper_content:

The current practice in multiagent systems typically associates the environment with resources that are external to agents and their communication infrastructure. Advanced uses of the environment include infrastructures for indirect coordination, such as digital pheromones, or support for governed interaction in electronic institutions. Yet, in general, the notion of environment is not well defined. Functionalities of the environment are often dealt with implicitly or in an ad hoc manner. This is not only poor engineering practice, it also hinders engineers to exploit the full potential of the environment in multiagent systems. ::: ::: In this paper, we put forward the environment as an explicit part of multiagent systems.We give a definition stating that the environment in a multiagent system is a first-class abstraction with dual roles: (1) the environment provides the surrounding conditions for agents to exist, which implies that the environment is an essential part of every multiagent system, and (2) the environment provides an exploitable design abstraction for building multiagent system applications. We discuss the responsibilities of such an environment in multiagent systems and we present a reference model for the environment that can serve as a basis for environment engineering. To illustrate the power of the environment as a design abstraction, we show how the environment is successfully exploited in a real world application. Considering the environment as a first-class abstraction in multiagent systems opens up new horizons for research and development in multiagent systems.
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paper_title: Modeling Agents and their Environment: The Communication Environment

paper_content:

Without an environment, an agent is effectively useless. Cut off from the rest of its world, the agent can neither sense nor act. An environment provides the conditions under which an entity (agent or object) can exist. It defines the properties of the world in which an agent will function. Designing effective agents requires careful consideration of both the physical and communicational aspects of their environment. This second part of this paper and deals with the communication environment.
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paper_title: Programming stigmergic coordination with the TOTA middleware

paper_content:

Stigmergic coordination has received a growing attention in the past few years. In fact, by decoupling interacting agents via the mediation of an active environment, stigmergy promotes the definition of robust and adaptive multiagent systems. However, beside a large amount of scientific studies, the problem of defining usable and general-purpose tools to program stigmergy-coordinated multiagent systems is still open. In this context, this paper shows how the TOTA middleware can be effectively exploited to support a variety of stigmergy-based coordination activities. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on a simple API for injecting tuple-based information in a network. have it propagate and/or evaporate accordingly to application-specific policies, and have it locally sensed by application agents. Application examples are presented to show that TOTA can promote a simple programming of a variety of different types of stigmergic interactions, in a variety of operational environments.
---
paper_title: Environment as a first class abstraction in multiagent systems

paper_content:

The current practice in multiagent systems typically associates the environment with resources that are external to agents and their communication infrastructure. Advanced uses of the environment include infrastructures for indirect coordination, such as digital pheromones, or support for governed interaction in electronic institutions. Yet, in general, the notion of environment is not well defined. Functionalities of the environment are often dealt with implicitly or in an ad hoc manner. This is not only poor engineering practice, it also hinders engineers to exploit the full potential of the environment in multiagent systems. ::: ::: In this paper, we put forward the environment as an explicit part of multiagent systems.We give a definition stating that the environment in a multiagent system is a first-class abstraction with dual roles: (1) the environment provides the surrounding conditions for agents to exist, which implies that the environment is an essential part of every multiagent system, and (2) the environment provides an exploitable design abstraction for building multiagent system applications. We discuss the responsibilities of such an environment in multiagent systems and we present a reference model for the environment that can serve as a basis for environment engineering. To illustrate the power of the environment as a design abstraction, we show how the environment is successfully exploited in a real world application. Considering the environment as a first-class abstraction in multiagent systems opens up new horizons for research and development in multiagent systems.
---
paper_title: Infrastructures for the environment of multiagent systems

paper_content:

The notion of environment is receiving an increasing attention in the development of multiagent applications. This is witnessed by the emergence of a number of infrastructures providing agent designers with useful means to develop the agent environment, and thus to structure an effective multiagent application. In this paper we analyse the role and features of such infrastructures, and survey some relevant examples. We endorse a general viewpoint where the environment of a multiagent system is seen as a set of basic bricks we call environment abstractions, which (i) provide agents with services useful for achieving individual and social goals, and (ii) are supported by some underlying software infrastructure managing their creation and exploitation. Accordingly, we focus the survey on the opportunities that environment infrastructures provide to system designers when developing multiagent applications.
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paper_title: Modeling Agent-Environment Interactions in Adaptive MAS

paper_content:

In this paper, we discuss a way to model Agent-Environment interactions in adaptive multi-agent systems. We describe the interactions at various levels of abstraction starting with the highest. For each level, we specify the interactions from four viewpoints functional, behavioral, dataand structural. This results into a set of models that capture the main properties of agent-environment interactions.
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paper_title: Pastry: Scalable, Decentralized Object Location, and Routing for Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Systems

paper_content:

This paper presents the design and evaluation of Pastry, a scalable, distributed object location and routing substrate for wide-area peer-to-peer ap- plications. Pastry performs application-level routing and object location in a po- tentially very large overlay network of nodes connected via the Internet. It can be used to support a variety of peer-to-peer applications, including global data storage, data sharing, group communication and naming. Each node in the Pastry network has a unique identifier (nodeId). When presented with a message and a key, a Pastry node efficiently routes the message to the node with a nodeId that is numerically closest to the key, among all currently live Pastry nodes. Each Pastry node keeps track of its immediate neighbors in the nodeId space, and notifies applications of new node arrivals, node failures and recoveries. Pastry takes into account network locality; it seeks to minimize the distance messages travel, according to a to scalar proximity metric like the number of IP routing hops. Pastry is completely decentralized, scalable, and self-organizing; it automatically adapts to the arrival, departure and failure of nodes. Experimental results obtained with a prototype implementation on an emulated network of up to 100,000 nodes confirm Pastry's scalability and efficiency, its ability to self-organize and adapt to node failures, and its good network locality properties.
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paper_title: Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities

paper_content:

The environment has been recognized as an explicit and exploitable element to design multi-agent systems (MAS). It can be assigned a number of responsibilities that would be more difficult to design with the sole notion of agents. To support the engineering of these responsibilities, we identify a set of mechanisms that offer solutions to software designers. We describe the mechanisms, their usage in representative projects, and potential opportunities for further research and applications. The purpose of this article is to clarify the notion of environment in terms of mechanisms, from their abstract description to their practical exploitation. Mechanisms are expected to provide agent-based software designers with a set of design elements to build MAS that take advantage of the environment.
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paper_title: AMELI: An Agent-Based Middleware for Electronic Institutions

paper_content:

The design and development of open multi-agent systems (MAS) is a key aspect in agent research. We advocate that they can be realised as electronic institutions. In this paper we focus on the execution of electronic institutions by introducing AMELI, an infrastructure that mediates agentsý interactions while enforcing institutional rules. An innovative feature of AMELI is that it is of general purpose (it can interpret any institution specification), and therefore it can be regarded as domain-independent. The combination of ISLANDER [5] and AMELI provides full support for the design and development of electronic institutions.
---
paper_title: Programming stigmergic coordination with the TOTA middleware

paper_content:

Stigmergic coordination has received a growing attention in the past few years. In fact, by decoupling interacting agents via the mediation of an active environment, stigmergy promotes the definition of robust and adaptive multiagent systems. However, beside a large amount of scientific studies, the problem of defining usable and general-purpose tools to program stigmergy-coordinated multiagent systems is still open. In this context, this paper shows how the TOTA middleware can be effectively exploited to support a variety of stigmergy-based coordination activities. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on a simple API for injecting tuple-based information in a network. have it propagate and/or evaporate accordingly to application-specific policies, and have it locally sensed by application agents. Application examples are presented to show that TOTA can promote a simple programming of a variety of different types of stigmergic interactions, in a variety of operational environments.
---
paper_title: The Agent Environment in Multi-Agent Systems: A Middleware Perspective

paper_content:

Interaction is at the core of multi-agent systems. We use agent environment as a general term to denote the medium for agent interaction. Over the last years, the agent environment has been subject of active research. In this paper, we reflect on the role of the agent environment in multi-agent systems from a middleware perspective. Our study yields the following observations: (1) multi-agent system engineers consider distributed middleware (RMI, CORBA, etc.) as the basic platform for developing multi-agent systems, (2) common middleware services (security, persistency, etc.) are only minimally considered in multi-agent systems, (3) domain-specific middleware for multi-agent systems such as communication services and support for stigmergic coordination are typically developed as stand-alone services and as such difficult to compose with other services. ::: ::: From these observations, we derive a number of challenges for research on environments in multi-agent systems: (1) to amplify reuse, application-specific services should be further consolidated into domain-specific services, (2) the problem of integration must be tackled, i.e. horizontal integration among domain-specific services for multi-agent systems, and vertical integration of domain-specific services upwards with the agents, and downwards with the common middleware services and the underlying distributed platform, (3) to support dynamic changing requirements of the system at hand, flexible composition and dynamic adaptation of services must be supported by the agent environment.
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paper_title: Give agents their artifacts: the A&A approach for engineering working environments in MAS

paper_content:

In human society, almost any cooperative working context accounts for different kinds of object, tool, artifacts in general, that humans adopt, share and intelligently exploit so as to support their working activities, in particular social ones. According to theories in human sciences--Activity Theory and Distributed Cognition are two main examples [5, 4]--and to related disciplines in computer science--such as Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)--such entities have a key role in determining the success or failure of the activities, playing an essential function in simplifying complex tasks and--more generally--in designing solutions that scale with activity complexity. Such a perspective can be found also in some works in the context of Distributed Artificial Intelligence [1, 2]. Analogously to the human case, we claim that also (cognitive) multiagent systems (MAS) could greatly benefit from the definition and systematic exploitation of a suitable notion of working environment, composed by different sorts of artifacts, dynamically constructed, shared and used by agents to support their working activities. Along this line, in this paper first we introduce a conceptual framework called AA then, we provide a brief overview of the basic technologies that support such an approach, CARTAGO in particular--a Java-based framework for engineering working environments to be integrated with heterogeneous agent platforms. Such a perspective is strenghtened by recent efforts in AOSE (Agent-Oriented Software Engineering) that remark the fundamental role of the environment for the engineering of MAS [8]. The AA (ii) cognitive---analogous to designed environment in human society, the properties of such environment abstractions should be conceived to be suitably and effectively exploited by cognitive agents, as intelligent constructors / users / manipulators of the environment. The work presented in this paper generalises and extends our previous work focussed on coordination artifacts presented at [6], and more recent works about the notion of artifact [7].
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paper_title: Programming MAS with Artifacts

paper_content:

This paper introduces the notion of artifact as a first-class ion in MASs (multi-agent systems) and focuses on its impact on MAS programming. Artifacts are runtime devices providing some kind of function or service which agents can fruitfully use - both individually and collectively - to achieve their individual as well as social objectives. Artifacts can be conceived (and programmed) as basic building blocks to model and build agent (working) environments. Besides introducing a conceptual and modelling framework, the paper discusses the impact of this new notion on MAS programming, focussing in particular on MAS composed by cognitive agents. To make the discussion more concrete, we provide an example scenario featuring 3APL agents whose coordination activity is supported by TuCSoN tuple centres - an existing coordination model providing some of the basic properties of artifacts for MASs.
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paper_title: Programming MAS with Artifacts

paper_content:

This paper introduces the notion of artifact as a first-class ion in MASs (multi-agent systems) and focuses on its impact on MAS programming. Artifacts are runtime devices providing some kind of function or service which agents can fruitfully use - both individually and collectively - to achieve their individual as well as social objectives. Artifacts can be conceived (and programmed) as basic building blocks to model and build agent (working) environments. Besides introducing a conceptual and modelling framework, the paper discusses the impact of this new notion on MAS programming, focussing in particular on MAS composed by cognitive agents. To make the discussion more concrete, we provide an example scenario featuring 3APL agents whose coordination activity is supported by TuCSoN tuple centres - an existing coordination model providing some of the basic properties of artifacts for MASs.
---
paper_title: Developing multiagent systems: The Gaia methodology

paper_content:

Systems composed of interacting autonomous agents offer a promising software engineering approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, this multiagent system paradigm introduces a number of new abstractions and design/development issues when compared with more traditional approaches to software development. Accordingly, new analysis and design methodologies, as well as new tools, are needed to effectively engineer such systems. Against this background, the contribution of this article is twofold. First, we synthesize and clarify the key abstractions of agent-based computing as they pertain to agent-oriented software engineering. In particular, we argue that a multiagent system can naturally be viewed and architected as a computational organization, and we identify the appropriate organizational abstractions that are central to the analysis and design of such systems. Second, we detail and extend the Gaia methodology for the analysis and design of multiagent systems. Gaia exploits the aforementioned organizational abstractions to provide clear guidelines for the analysis and design of complex and open software systems. Two representative case studies are introduced to exemplify Gaia's concepts and to show its use and effectiveness in different types of multiagent system.
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paper_title: Engineering Organization-based Multiagent Systems

paper_content:

In this paper, we examine the Multiagent Systems Engineering (MaSE) methodology and its applicability to developing organization-based multiagent systems, which are especially relevant to context aware systems. We discuss the inherent shortcomings of MaSE and then present our approach to modeling the concepts required for organizations including goals, roles, agents, capabilities, and the assignment of agents to roles. Finally, we extend MaSE to allow it to overcome its inherent shortcomings and capture the organizational concepts defined in our organization metamodel.
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paper_title: An Agent-Environment Interaction Model

paper_content:

This paper develops a model for precisely defining how an agent interacts with objects in its environment through the use of its capabilities. Capabilities are recursively defined in terms of lower-level capabilities and actions, which represent atomic interactions with the environment. Actions are used to represent both sensors and effectors. The paper shows how the model can be used to represent both software and physical agents and their capabilities. The paper also shows how the model can be integrated into the Organization-based Multiagent Systems Engineering methodology.
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paper_title: SODA: Societies and Infrastructures in the Analysis and Design of Agent-Based Systems

paper_content:

The notion of society should play a central role in agent-oriented software engineering as a first-class abstraction around which complex systems can be designed and built as multi-agent systems. We argue that an effective agentoriented methodology should account for inter-agent aspects by providing engineers with specific abstractions and tools for the analysis and design of agent societies and agent environments. ::: ::: In this paper, we outline the SODA agent-oriented methodology for the analysis and design of Internet-based systems. Based on the core notion of task, SODA promotes the separation of individual and social issues, and focuses on the social aspects of agent-oriented software engineering. In particular, SODA allow the agent environment to be explicitly modelled and mapped onto suitably-defined agent infrastructures.
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paper_title: SODA: A Roadmap to Artefacts

paper_content:

An artefact for MASs is an entity not driven by an inner goal (as agents are), but used by agents to achieve their own goals. In this paper, we assume agents and artefacts as first-class entities in MAS engineering, and claim that agent-oriented methodologies should exploit these two abstractions as the basic bricks for the whole engineering process. As a first testbed, we take the SODA agent-oriented methodology and draw a possible roadmap for its extension toward the notion of artefact.
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paper_title: Tropos: An Agent-Oriented Software Development Methodology

paper_content:

Our goal in this paper is to introduce and motivate a methodology, called Tropos,1 for building agent oriented software systems. Tropos is based on two key ideas. First, the notion of agent and all related mentalistic notions (for instance goals and plans) are used in all phases of software development, from early analysis down to the actual implementation. Second, Tropos covers also the very early phases of requirements analysis, thus allowing for a deeper understanding of the environment where the software must operate, and of the kind of interactions that should occur between software and human agents. The methodology is illustrated with the help of a case study. The Tropos language for conceptual modeling is formalized in a metamodel described with a set of UML class diagrams.
---
paper_title: Developing multiagent systems: The Gaia methodology

paper_content:

Systems composed of interacting autonomous agents offer a promising software engineering approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, this multiagent system paradigm introduces a number of new abstractions and design/development issues when compared with more traditional approaches to software development. Accordingly, new analysis and design methodologies, as well as new tools, are needed to effectively engineer such systems. Against this background, the contribution of this article is twofold. First, we synthesize and clarify the key abstractions of agent-based computing as they pertain to agent-oriented software engineering. In particular, we argue that a multiagent system can naturally be viewed and architected as a computational organization, and we identify the appropriate organizational abstractions that are central to the analysis and design of such systems. Second, we detail and extend the Gaia methodology for the analysis and design of multiagent systems. Gaia exploits the aforementioned organizational abstractions to provide clear guidelines for the analysis and design of complex and open software systems. Two representative case studies are introduced to exemplify Gaia's concepts and to show its use and effectiveness in different types of multiagent system.
---
paper_title: An Observation Framework for Multi-agent Systems

paper_content:

Existing middleware platforms for multi-agent systems (MAS) do not provide general support for observation. On the other hand, observation is considered to be an important mechanism needed for realizing effective and efficient coordination of agents. This paper describes a framework called Agent Observable Environment (AOE) for observation-based interaction in MAS. The framework provides 1) possibility to model MAS components with RDF-based observable soft-bodies, 2) support for both query and publish/subscribe style ontology-driven observation, and 3) ability to restrict the visibility of observable information using observation rules. Additionally, we report on an implementation of the framework for the JADE middleware platform, where AOE is realized as a custom kernel service.
---
paper_title: SODA: Societies and Infrastructures in the Analysis and Design of Agent-Based Systems

paper_content:

The notion of society should play a central role in agent-oriented software engineering as a first-class abstraction around which complex systems can be designed and built as multi-agent systems. We argue that an effective agentoriented methodology should account for inter-agent aspects by providing engineers with specific abstractions and tools for the analysis and design of agent societies and agent environments. ::: ::: In this paper, we outline the SODA agent-oriented methodology for the analysis and design of Internet-based systems. Based on the core notion of task, SODA promotes the separation of individual and social issues, and focuses on the social aspects of agent-oriented software engineering. In particular, SODA allow the agent environment to be explicitly modelled and mapped onto suitably-defined agent infrastructures.
---
paper_title: An Agent-Environment Interaction Model

paper_content:

This paper develops a model for precisely defining how an agent interacts with objects in its environment through the use of its capabilities. Capabilities are recursively defined in terms of lower-level capabilities and actions, which represent atomic interactions with the environment. Actions are used to represent both sensors and effectors. The paper shows how the model can be used to represent both software and physical agents and their capabilities. The paper also shows how the model can be integrated into the Organization-based Multiagent Systems Engineering methodology.
---
paper_title: Environment as a first class abstraction in multiagent systems

paper_content:

The current practice in multiagent systems typically associates the environment with resources that are external to agents and their communication infrastructure. Advanced uses of the environment include infrastructures for indirect coordination, such as digital pheromones, or support for governed interaction in electronic institutions. Yet, in general, the notion of environment is not well defined. Functionalities of the environment are often dealt with implicitly or in an ad hoc manner. This is not only poor engineering practice, it also hinders engineers to exploit the full potential of the environment in multiagent systems. ::: ::: In this paper, we put forward the environment as an explicit part of multiagent systems.We give a definition stating that the environment in a multiagent system is a first-class abstraction with dual roles: (1) the environment provides the surrounding conditions for agents to exist, which implies that the environment is an essential part of every multiagent system, and (2) the environment provides an exploitable design abstraction for building multiagent system applications. We discuss the responsibilities of such an environment in multiagent systems and we present a reference model for the environment that can serve as a basis for environment engineering. To illustrate the power of the environment as a design abstraction, we show how the environment is successfully exploited in a real world application. Considering the environment as a first-class abstraction in multiagent systems opens up new horizons for research and development in multiagent systems.
---
paper_title: Give agents their artifacts: the A&A approach for engineering working environments in MAS

paper_content:

In human society, almost any cooperative working context accounts for different kinds of object, tool, artifacts in general, that humans adopt, share and intelligently exploit so as to support their working activities, in particular social ones. According to theories in human sciences--Activity Theory and Distributed Cognition are two main examples [5, 4]--and to related disciplines in computer science--such as Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)--such entities have a key role in determining the success or failure of the activities, playing an essential function in simplifying complex tasks and--more generally--in designing solutions that scale with activity complexity. Such a perspective can be found also in some works in the context of Distributed Artificial Intelligence [1, 2]. Analogously to the human case, we claim that also (cognitive) multiagent systems (MAS) could greatly benefit from the definition and systematic exploitation of a suitable notion of working environment, composed by different sorts of artifacts, dynamically constructed, shared and used by agents to support their working activities. Along this line, in this paper first we introduce a conceptual framework called AA then, we provide a brief overview of the basic technologies that support such an approach, CARTAGO in particular--a Java-based framework for engineering working environments to be integrated with heterogeneous agent platforms. Such a perspective is strenghtened by recent efforts in AOSE (Agent-Oriented Software Engineering) that remark the fundamental role of the environment for the engineering of MAS [8]. The AA (ii) cognitive---analogous to designed environment in human society, the properties of such environment abstractions should be conceived to be suitably and effectively exploited by cognitive agents, as intelligent constructors / users / manipulators of the environment. The work presented in this paper generalises and extends our previous work focussed on coordination artifacts presented at [6], and more recent works about the notion of artifact [7].
---
paper_title: CArtAgO: a framework for prototyping artifact-based environments in MAS

paper_content:

This paper describes CArtAgO, a framework for developing artifact-based working environments for multiagent systems (MAS). The framework is based on the notion of artifact, as a basic abstraction to model and engineer objects, resources and tools designed to be used and manipulated by agents at run-time to support their working activities, in particular the cooperative ones. CArtAgO enables MAS engineers to design and develop suitable artifacts, and to extend existing agent platforms with the possibility to create artifact-based working environments, programming agents to exploit them. In this paper, first the abstract model and architecture of CArtAgO is described, then a first Java-based prototype technology is discussed.
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paper_title: Oversensing with a softbody in the environment: Another dimension of observation

paper_content:

Research in Multi-Agent Systems extensively approached observation mechanisms from outside. Agents are black boxes and much work allows inferring internals or collective activities from the observation of their interactions. In this paper, we propose to extend the expressiveness of software agents and enact new observable features. Our framework leads to an extended definition of agent; the central role of a software environment to deal with these agents; and a mechanism we named oversensing to refer to the observation of these agents. This paper presents these notions and provides preliminary insights on their exploitation.
---
paper_title: Infrastructures for the environment of multiagent systems

paper_content:

The notion of environment is receiving an increasing attention in the development of multiagent applications. This is witnessed by the emergence of a number of infrastructures providing agent designers with useful means to develop the agent environment, and thus to structure an effective multiagent application. In this paper we analyse the role and features of such infrastructures, and survey some relevant examples. We endorse a general viewpoint where the environment of a multiagent system is seen as a set of basic bricks we call environment abstractions, which (i) provide agents with services useful for achieving individual and social goals, and (ii) are supported by some underlying software infrastructure managing their creation and exploitation. Accordingly, we focus the survey on the opportunities that environment infrastructures provide to system designers when developing multiagent applications.
---
paper_title: An Observation Framework for Multi-agent Systems

paper_content:

Existing middleware platforms for multi-agent systems (MAS) do not provide general support for observation. On the other hand, observation is considered to be an important mechanism needed for realizing effective and efficient coordination of agents. This paper describes a framework called Agent Observable Environment (AOE) for observation-based interaction in MAS. The framework provides 1) possibility to model MAS components with RDF-based observable soft-bodies, 2) support for both query and publish/subscribe style ontology-driven observation, and 3) ability to restrict the visibility of observable information using observation rules. Additionally, we report on an implementation of the framework for the JADE middleware platform, where AOE is realized as a custom kernel service.
---
paper_title: An Observation Framework for Multi-agent Systems

paper_content:

Existing middleware platforms for multi-agent systems (MAS) do not provide general support for observation. On the other hand, observation is considered to be an important mechanism needed for realizing effective and efficient coordination of agents. This paper describes a framework called Agent Observable Environment (AOE) for observation-based interaction in MAS. The framework provides 1) possibility to model MAS components with RDF-based observable soft-bodies, 2) support for both query and publish/subscribe style ontology-driven observation, and 3) ability to restrict the visibility of observable information using observation rules. Additionally, we report on an implementation of the framework for the JADE middleware platform, where AOE is realized as a custom kernel service.
---
paper_title: Extrospection: agents reasoning about the environment

paper_content:

Current practices for agent-infrastructure interaction enforce agent designers to hard code the name and the use of the infrastructure components in the agent. Therefore, agents can only function within an environment which is a priori known to the agent designer. Even in these environments, agents are not robust against the modification or failure of the infrastructures that may occur at run time. This makes agents fragile in the context of distributed, large scale, and complex environments. We argue that semantic technologies can be employed to overcome these limitations. This paper introduces an ontology called OWL-T that supports the specifications of infrastructure components that allow agents to reason about the functionality and the use at run time. We use the term extrospection for the reasoning done by the agents for the discovery and the use of the infrastructure components based on the tasks and the goals of the agent. A proof of concept implementation illustrates the use of OWL-T in a multi-agent foraging scenario.
---
paper_title: Towards a Core Ontology for Information Integration

paper_content:

In this paper, we argue that a core ontology is one of the key building blocks necessary to enable the scalable assimilation of information from diverse sources. A complete and extensible ontology that expresses the basic concepts that are common across a variety of domains and can provide the basis for specialization into domain-specific concepts and vocabularies, is essential for well-defined mappings between domain-specific knowledge representations (i.e., metadata vocabularies) and the subsequent building of a variety of services such as cross-domain searching, browsing, data mining and knowledge extraction. This paper describes the results of a series of three workshops held in 2001 and 2002 which brought together representatives from the cultural heritage and digital library communities with the goal of harmonizing their knowledge perspectives and producing a core ontology. The knowledge perspectives of these two communities were represented by the CIDOC/CRM [31], an ontology for information exchange in the cultural heritage and museum community, and the ABC ontology [33], a model for the exchange and integration of digital library information. This paper describes the mediation process between these two different knowledge biases and the results of this mediation - the harmonization of the ABC and CIDOC/CRM ontologies, which we believe may provide a useful basis for information integration in the wider scope of the involved communities.
---
paper_title: Extrospection: agents reasoning about the environment

paper_content:

Current practices for agent-infrastructure interaction enforce agent designers to hard code the name and the use of the infrastructure components in the agent. Therefore, agents can only function within an environment which is a priori known to the agent designer. Even in these environments, agents are not robust against the modification or failure of the infrastructures that may occur at run time. This makes agents fragile in the context of distributed, large scale, and complex environments. We argue that semantic technologies can be employed to overcome these limitations. This paper introduces an ontology called OWL-T that supports the specifications of infrastructure components that allow agents to reason about the functionality and the use at run time. We use the term extrospection for the reasoning done by the agents for the discovery and the use of the infrastructure components based on the tasks and the goals of the agent. A proof of concept implementation illustrates the use of OWL-T in a multi-agent foraging scenario.
---

Title: Agent-Environment Interaction in MAS - Introduction and Survey

Section 1: Definition and Basic Relationship between Agents and Environment
Description 1: This section defines agents and their interaction with complex and dynamic environments, referencing various definitions by leading researchers. 

Section 2: Dynamics of Agent-Environment Interaction
Description 2: This section covers the decomposition of system dynamics into the environment and agents, describing their roles and interactions in MAS.

Section 3: Environment as a Computational Infrastructure for MAS
Description 3: This section explores the role of the environment as a computational infrastructure enabling and regulating interactions within MAS, including common processing platforms.

Section 4: Emergence of Environment as a First-Class Abstraction
Description 4: This section discusses the shift towards treating the environment as a first-class abstraction in MAS, including the functionalities and support it should offer.

Section 5: Architectural Models of Environment in MAS
Description 5: This section delves into various architectural models proposed for the MAS environment, describing the interaction levels and reference models like the FIPA architecture.

Section 6: Agent-Environment Interface
Description 6: This section focuses on the interface between agents and the environment, presenting various approaches to keeping it simple yet effective for complex interactions.

Section 7: Artifacts as a Unifying Abstraction
Description 7: This section introduces artifacts as general computational devices in MAS, used to model environment-mediated interaction and their role throughout the MAS lifecycle.

Section 8: Methodologies for Agent-Environment Interaction in AOSE
Description 8: This section discusses different Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies that emphasize agent-environment interaction, analyzing gaps and solutions.

Section 9: Context and Preconditions for Agent Actions
Description 9: This section elaborates on the context within which agent actions are performed, including environment observability and contextual conditions impacting agent actions.

Section 10: Infrastructural Support for Agent-Environment Interface
Description 10: This section surveys existing infrastructures that support agent-environment interface, highlighting their role in minimizing the conceptual gap between design-time models and implementation.

Section 11: Semantic Description of Environment
Description 11: This section covers the formal semantic descriptions of the environment, emphasizing on core ontologies and their role in facilitating agent discovery and interaction with environmental resources.

Section 12: OWL-T and Extrospection
Description 12: This section introduces the OWL-T ontology for describing infrastructural components and the concept of extrospection for agents to discover and reason about environmental resources.

Section 13: Conclusions
Description 13: This section summarizes the findings on agent-environment interaction, highlighting the importance of a unified approach to agent sensing and actions, and potential extensions to the current models.