Building Cognitively Rich Agents

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM March 1999/Vol. 42, No. 3 71 The first approach focuses on forms of communication, requirements for consistent collaboration, planning of coordinated behaviors to achieve collaborative goals, extensions to logics of action and belief for multiple agents, and types of emergent phenomena when many agents interact, for instance, taking routing decisions on a telecommunications network. The second approach focuses on the internal architecture of individual agents required for social interaction, collaborative behaviors, complex decision making, learning, and emergent phenomena within complex agents. Agents with complex internal structure may, for example, combine perception, motive generation, planning, plan execution, execution monitoring, and even emotional reactions. We expect the second approach to become increasingly important for large multiagent systems deployed in networked environments, as the level of intelligence required of individual agents increases. This is particularly relevant to work on agents that must cooperate to perform tasks requiring planning, problem solving, learning, opportunistic redirection of plans, and fine ynthetic agents with varying degrees of intelligence and