Agents in Approximate Environments

The starting point of this research is the multimodal approach to modeling multiagent systems, especially Beliefs, Goals and Intention systems. Such an approach is suitable for specifying and verifying many subtle aspects of agents’ informational and motivational attitudes. However, in this chapter we make a shift in a perspective. More precisely, we propose the method of embedding multimodal approaches into a form of approximate reasoning suitable for modeling perception, namely a similaritybased approximate reasoning. We argue that this formalism allows one to both keep the intuitive semantics compatible with that of multimodal logics as well as to model and implement phenomena occurring at the perception level. 1.1. From Quantitative to Symbolic Modeling of Multiagent Systems The overall goal of modeling reality is to create its adequate description. Especially in the initial phases of modeling, the proper choice of the underlying formalisms is essential, as it provides means for knowledge representation and reasoning, reflecting both the properties of an environment and the application in question. In order to adequately make the choice, one should take into account the quality of information available during the entire model life cycle including its development, use and maintenance. Clearly, many important issues are involved here. This chapter concentrates on the quality of available information such as possible incompleteness, uncertainty and imprecision. The underlying formalism cannot be adequately chosen without addressing these issues. 1Institute of Informatics, Warsaw University, ul. Banacha 2, 02-097 Warsaw, Poland, Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, Ordona 21, 01-237 Warsaw, Poland, and NIAS, Meijboomlaan 1, 2242 PR Wassenaar, The Netherlands, e-mail: [email protected]. 2Institute of Informatics, Warsaw University, ul. Banacha 2, 02-097 Warsaw, Poland and Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Linköping, SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden, email: andrzej.szalas@{mimuw.edu.pl, liu.se}.