Agent Environments for Multi-agent Systems – A Research Roadmap

Abstract

Abstract. Ten years ago, researchers in multi-agent systems became more and more aware that agent systems consist of more than only agents. The series of workshops on Environments for Multi-Agent Systems (E4MAS 2004(E4MAS -2006 emerged from this awareness. One of the primary outcomes of this endeavor was a principled understanding that the agent environment should be considered as a primary design abstraction, equally important as the agents. A special issue in JAAMAS 2007 contributed a set of influential papers that define the role of agent environments, describe their engineering, and outline challenges in the field that have been the drivers for numerous follow up research efforts. The goal of this paper is to wrap up what has been achieved in the past 10 years and identify challenges for future research on agent environments. Instead of taking a broad perspective, we focus on three particularly relevant topics of modern software intensive systems: large scale, openness, and humans in the loop. For each topic, we reflect on the challenges outlined 10 years ago, present an example application that highlights the current trends, and from that outline challenges for the future. We conclude with a roadmap on how the different challenges could be tackled.

Agents: Agenthood, Agent Architectures, and Agent Taxonomies

“…• Testing of individual agents, • Testing of agent societies, • Systematic simulation-based generation of test cases, • A better understanding of the environment in which the agent is situated, an aspect that has recently attracted attention (Weyns et al, 2005).…”

A generic model for representing openness in multi-agent systems

“…This definition is adopted and developed in Weyns et al . (2015). In the latter work, open MAS are seen as systems where agents interact together in order to achieve their objective.…”

“…Thus, they are seen as systems that are developed under consideration of standards of interoperability and with respect to social aspects. This definition is adopted and developed in Weyns et al (2015). In the latter work, open MAS are seen as systems where agents interact together in order to achieve their objective.…”

Engineering Multi-Agent Systems

“…In the paper "Engineering World-Wide Multi-Agent Systems with Hypermedia", Andrei Ciortea, Olivier Boissier and Alessandro Ricci propose an approach to engineer large-scale, evolvable MAS using hypermedia. In a hypermedia MAS, inline with the notion of agent environments [48], agents are situated in a distributed hypermedia environment that they can navigate and use in pursuit of their goals. Agents use the hypermedia to discover: (i) other entities in the MAS (e.g., other agents, tools, knowledge repositories, organizations, datasets etc.…”