Social Agents in Digital Cities

The research community tackling agents and multiagent systems has studied and developed various agents. Typically, personal agents belong to humans and help their users to operate complex computer/communication systems. In the area of multiagent systems, though computational agents are designed to interact (both collaborate and compete) with each other, interaction among humans and software agents has not been studied intensively. In this paper, however, we focus on social agents, which can be members of a human community: social agents support human-human interactions, while personal agents support human-computer interactions. To understand the nature of social agents, we need a research platform to play with them. This paper proposes a scenario description language called Q for designing interactions among a large number of agents, and its application to digital cities and crisis management simulations.