Towards a Unified View of the Environment(s) within Multi-Agent Systems

Within the Multi-agent systems (MASs) paradigm, the concept of the environment plays a central role. In fact, the autonomous agents do only exist when they are deployed on an environment. Still, there is an implicit hypothesis in current trends of the MASs considering that the agents are related to only one environment that captures all the different aspects of the application domain. In this paper we challenge this implicit hypothesis by enabling multiple occurrences of the agent-environment relationship. This brings clarity and modularity for the design and implementation of complex MASs since each environment targets a specific aspect of the application. Thanks to the proposed characterization of the agent-environment relationship, the agents are still offered a unified view about all the environments.

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