Context-Aware Emergent Behaviour in a MAS for Information Exchange

The plethora of interconnected devices that surrounds modern people has yet to work together as a whole. An intelligent environment must sense and react to the actions of people, but to that end a large quantity of information must be exchanged throughout the system. Under realistic conditions, it is impossible to control and coordinate the exchange of information in a centralized way. Solving this problem involves key concepts like self-organization, emergent behaviour and context-awareness. Continuing previous work on self-organizing cognitive multi-agent systems for the exchange and management of information, this paper introduces two aspects of context-awareness – pressure and interest – that make the system's emergent behaviour more context-sensitive and, therefore, more adaptive to a changing environment.