Environment, First-Order Abstraction in Multiagent Systems

Current practice in multiagent systems typically associates the environment with resources external to the agents and infrastructure for communication. Advanced uses of the environment are infrastructures for indirect coordination such as digital pheromones, or support for governed interaction as 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 of the environment that states that the environment is a first-order abstraction in multiagent systems with a dual role: (1) the environment provides the surrounding conditions for agents to exists, which implies that the environment is an essential part of every multiagent system, and (2) the environment provides an exploitable design abstraction to build multiagent system applications. We discuss responsibilities of the 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 design abstraction, we show how the environment is successfully exploited in a real world application. Considering the environment as a first-order abstraction in multiagent systems opens up new horizons for research and development in multiagent systems.