MECA: A Multi-agent Environment for Cognitive Agents

Many fully functional multi-agent systems have been developed and put to use over the past twenty years, but few of them have been developed to succesfully facilitate social research through the use of social agents. There are three important difficulties that must be dealt with to successfully create a social system for use in social research. First, the system must have an adaptable agent framework that can successfully make intuitive and deliberative decisions much like a human participant would. Secondly, the system must have a robust architecture that not only ensures its functioning no matter the simulation, but also provides an easily understood interface that researchers can interact with while running their simulations. Finally, the system must be effectively distributed to handle the necessary number of agents that social research requires to obtain meaningful results. This paper presents our work on creating a multi-agent simulation for social agents that overcomes these three difficulties.