When Agents Emerge from Agents: Introducing Multi-scale Viewpoints in Multi-agent Simulations

Current multi-agent simulations, which have many individual entities evolve and interact, often lead to the emergence of local groups of entities, but provide no means of manipulating them. To our mind, giving full a sense to multi-agent simulations would consist though in making use of such dynamically created potential groups, by granting them an existence of their own, and specific behaviours. Brought into operation, they would provide effective and new tools for modelling purposes : for instance, encapsulating physical laws which depend on scaling, thus giving means of apprehending micro-macro links in multi-agent simulations, or introducing the experimentater’s viewpoints on the specific behaviours of such groups. We thus have to imagine how to give any set of agents means of becoming aware of their mutual interaction, and giving birth to new types of agents out of their collective activity. In other words we look for a computer equivalent to our own emergence recognition ability. We present here a conceptual reflexion on such matters in the light of our own experience in the development of the RIVAGE project at Orstom, which aims at simulating runoff and infiltration processes. Conversely, we believe that the development of our methods in such a novel and original field of research as the multi-agent simulation of pure physical processes will provide new ideas and tools useful for many multi-agent architectures and modelling purposes.