Environments for Multiagent Systems

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 in multiagent systems is now gradually accepted in the multiagent system community in general. The aim of the AgentLink Technical Forum Group (TFG) on Environments for Multiagent Systems is to put forward the environment as a strategic research direction for multiagent systems. The TFG considers the environment as a first-order abstraction in multiagent systems. This claim 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. During the first meeting of the TFG, the group had an open discussion on a number of core topics regarding environments. Discussion topics ranged from the fundamental question “what is an environment” over “how to engineer environments” to the discussion of a number of real-world applications in which the environment plays a central role. This report elaborates on the different topics discussed during the TFG meeting.