Toward Distributed Context-Mediated Behavior for Multiagent Systems

Although much attention has been devoted to modeling and using context in intelligent agents, relatively little has been given to the problem for multiagent systems (MASs). Yet, just as with an individual agent, context affects how a MAS should behave. In this paper, we discuss an approach to distributed context management for multiagent systems. The approach is based on earlier work on context-mediated behavior (CMB) for single agents, which explicitly represents contexts as c-schemas that contain knowledge about how to behave in the contexts represented. We are distributing CMB for use in advanced multiagent systems. This work is just beginning, and so the paper discusses issues and potential approaches to distributing CMB.