Give agents their artifacts: the A&A approach for engineering working environments in MAS

摘要: In human society, almost any cooperative working context accounts for different kinds of object, tool, artifacts in general, that humans adopt, share and intelligently exploit so as to support their activities, particular social ones. According theories sciences--Activity Theory Distributed Cognition are two main examples [5, 4]--and related disciplines computer science--such Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)--such entities have a key role determining the success or failure playing an essential function simplifying complex tasks and--more generally--in designing solutions scale with activity complexity. Such perspective can be found also some works Artificial Intelligence [1, 2].Analogously case, we claim (cognitive) multiagent systems (MAS) could greatly benefit from definition systematic exploitation suitable notion environment, composed by sorts artifacts, dynamically constructed, shared used agents activities.Along this line, paper first introduce conceptual framework called AA then, provide brief overview basic technologies such approach, CARTAGO particular--a Java-based engineering environments integrated heterogeneous agent platforms.Such is strenghtened recent efforts AOSE (Agent-Oriented Software Engineering) remark fundamental environment MAS [8]. The (ii) cognitive---analogous designed properties abstractions should conceived suitably effectively exploited cognitive agents, intelligent constructors / users manipulators environment.The work presented generalises extends our previous focussed on coordination at [6], more about artifact [7].