Towards User Centred Multi-Agent Systems : Illustration on Cooperative Agricultural Robots

This paper reports first trials to include the User aspect into MultiAgent Systems, which is a basic need if Multi-Agent Systems want to contribute to environments where the User is tightly coupled with decentralised systems, such as pervasive computing. The paper first outlines how Multi-Agent Systems have developed from Agent Centred Multi-Agent Systems to Organisation Centred Multi-Agent Systems. We exemplify this with problems from robotic systems in the agricultural environment. We then elaborate how Multi-Agent Systems should be designed by focusing on the User, and we propose to designate this class of resulting systems as being User Centred Multi-Agent Systems. We illustrate how this approach enables us to model and analyse more complex problem domains than Organization Centred Multi-Agent Systems are able to. We finally discuss the future directions and examples of possible application domains of such User Centred Multi-agent Systems.