Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-27gpq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T21:58:00.229Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Environments in multiagent systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2006

DANNY WEYNS
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200A, 3001 Leuven, Belgium; e-mail: danny.weyns@cs.kuleuven.be, tom.holvoet@cs.kuleuven.be
MICHAEL SCHUMACHER
Affiliation:
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015, Lausanne, Switzerland; e-mail: michael.schumacher@epfl.ch
ALESSANDRO RICCI
Affiliation:
Università di Bologna, 47032 Cesena, Italy; e-mail: a.ricci@unibo.it, mirko.viroli@unibo.it
MIRKO VIROLI
Affiliation:
Università di Bologna, 47032 Cesena, Italy; e-mail: a.ricci@unibo.it, mirko.viroli@unibo.it
TOM HOLVOET
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200A, 3001 Leuven, Belgium; e-mail: danny.weyns@cs.kuleuven.be, tom.holvoet@cs.kuleuven.be

Abstract

There is a growing awareness in the multiagent systems research community that the environment plays a prominent role in multiagent systems. Originating from research on behavior-based agent systems 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 put forward the environment as a first-order abstraction in multiagent systems. This position is motivated by the fact that several aspects of multiagent systems that conceptually do not belong to agents themselves should not be assigned to, or hosted inside the agents. Examples are infrastructure for communication, the topology of a spatial domain or support for the action model. These and other aspects should be considered explicitly. The environment is the natural candidate to encapsulate these aspects. We elaborate on environment engineering, and we illustrate how the environment plays a central role in a real-world multiagent system application.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)