Artifacts in the A&A meta-model for multi-agent systems

Abstract

In this article we focus on the notion of artifact for agents in multi-agent systems (MAS) as a basis for a new meta-model promoting the modelling and engineering of agent societies and MAS environment as first-class entities. Its conceptual foundations lay upon theories and results coming from computational sciences as well as from organisational and cognitive sciences, psychology, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), anthropology and ethology. In the resulting agents & artifacts (A&A) meta-model, agents are the (pro-)active entities in charge of the goals/tasks that altogether build up the whole MAS behaviour, whereas artifacts are the reactive entities providing the services and functions that make individual agents work together in a MAS, and that shape agent environment according to the MAS needs. After presenting the scientific background, we define the notions of artifact in the A&A meta-model, discuss how it affects the notion of intelligence in MAS, and show its application to a number of agent-related research fields.

Computational Accountability in MAS Organizations with ADOPT

“…Here, an agent is specified by a set of beliefs, representing both the agent's current state and knowledge about the environment, a set of goals, and a set of plans which are courses of actions, triggered by events. CArtAgO, based on the Agents & Artifacts meta-model [60], is a framework for environment programming which conceives the environment as a layer encapsulating functionalities and services that agents can explore and use at runtime [61]. An environment is programmed as a dynamic set of artifacts, whose observable states can be perceived by the agents.…”

Norm reasoning services

“…Artifacts are resources and tools that agents can create and use to perform their individual and social activities [29]. For example, the ORA4MAS [22] proposal defines artifacts as first-class entities to instrument multiagent organisations to support agent activities within them.…”

Interoperability of MAS DSMLs via horizontal model transformations

“…[4][5][6][7]), which include fundamental entities and relations of agent systems. In addition, many model-driven agent development approaches are provided such as [8][9][10] and by enriching MAS metamodels with some defined syntax and semantics (usually translational semantics [11]), researchers also propose domain-specific languages (DSLs) / domain- This study is funded by the Scientific Research Projects Directorate of Ege University under grant 16-UBE-001.…”

“…When we take into account the different abstractions covered by the metamodels of MAS DSMLs and the underlying agent execution platforms, DSML metamodels can be accepted as the platform-independent metamodels (PIMMs) of agent systems while metamodels of the agent execution platforms are platform-specific metamodels (PSMMs) according to the OMG's well-known Modeldriven Architecture (MDA) 4 as also indicated in [5] and [9]. Above described methodology applied in the current MAS DSML development approaches for the derivation of operational semantics unfortunately requires the definition and implementation of new M2M and M2T transformations from scratch in order to make the DSMLs functional for different agent execution platforms.…”