Multiagent Systems: A Theoretical Framework for Intentions, Know-How, and Communications
| Munindar P. Singh, 1994 | Bib INPE: 681.3.019 SI64M |
It [MAS] also provides insights and understanding about interactions among humans, as they organize themselves into various groups, committees, societies, and economies in order to improve their lives.
Economists have been studying multiple agents for more than two hundred years, ever since Adam Smith in the eighteen century, with the goal of being able to understand and predict economies. Economics provides ways to characterize masses of agents, and these are useful for DAI.
- DAI deals with open systems, i.e., system that are too large or unpredictable to be completely characterized. Most real systems are of this type.
- DAI is the best way to characterize or design distributed computing systems
- provides a natural way to view intelligent systems
Formal description and semantics for building MAS.
The messages fall into a handful of major logical categories:
- requests
- queries
- assertions
- permissions
- promises
- prohibitions
(add figure 2.1)
The first agent can constrain the future to some intent by choosing action a or b. […] However, the agent cannot control what exactly transpires. Both choice and limited control are captured by this model.
The actions are selected by an agent on the fly on the basis of the state of the environment he finds himself facing.
It is often useful to be able to identify actions by their effects. However, usually, the effects of actors are far from certain.
A speech act is associated with at least three distinct actions:
- a locution, or the corresponding physical utterance.
- an illocution, or the conveying speaker's intent to the hearer
- any number of perlocutions, or actions that occur as a result of the illocution