Formalising the Environment in MAS Programming: A Formal Model for Artifact-Based Environments

摘要

Although the role of environment in designing and engineering Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) has been largely acknowledged and explored in literature, no formal model has been developed so far to rigorously define the main features of environment in the context of MAS programming, in particular to be integrated and exploited with existing agent programming languages/frameworks and related formalisations. Accordingly, in this paper we present a formalisation of a general-purpose model for environment programming, based on the notion of artifact as introduced in the A&A meta-model and implemented by the CArtAgO framework. Although based on the A&A meta-model, we argue that the model can be useful to understand and analyse aspects that are important for environment programming in general.