Actions and social interactions in multi-agent systems

The agent ability to act in order to achieve its private goals belongs to basic properties defining this class of artificial systems. However when agents are considered in context of multi-agent systems it very often happens that their actions become involved in multiple, simple or complex social relations with other acting and autonomous entities. In such cases agents belonging to a broader multi-agent population need to take into account other agents while planning and realizing their behavior. According to definitions accepted in social sciences, all acts, actions and practices that involve more than two agents and affect or take account of other agents’ activities, experiences or knowledge states are called the social interactions. Such interactions encompass in various ways another selves and intend to affect their states of emotions, intentions, and beliefs. Their basic property is that they are always based on mutual and subjective orientation towards other agents’ thoughts as well as some results from other agents’ activities. The application of the social interaction concept to enhancements of multi-agent systems’ functionality is a natural step towards designing and implementing more intelligent and human-like populations of artificial autonomous systems. The related research and design efforts are understood by the Artificial Intelligence community as a necessary step towards the production of systems that are capable of advanced forms of cooperation, self-coordination, group planning, coalition formation, social problem solving, etc. Obviously, all computational approaches and modeling techniques that can contribute in this or another way to such development of artificial social interaction, have lately become an interesting and intensively studied target of scientific research. There are multiple, lower and higher level cognitive and emotional abilities needed to realize particular cases of social interactions. However, two of them seem to be especially required: the ability to create private intentional reference towards other agents in the same group and the ability to process gained knowledge on the semantic level. Many interesting problems of theoretical and practical nature emerge in relation to the above named capabilities.