Varying the user interaction within multi-agent systems
Terry R. Payne, Katia P. Sycara, Michael Lewis · 2000
Agents within an open multi-agent system are located through their advertisements with middle agents. Such advertisements describe the agent's capability, ontology, query or task specication, and details about the data returned once the task has been completed. Agents may have similar capabilities, but exhibit dierent models of user interaction. A case study of a multi-agent system is described which contains a variety of dierent agents, some of which have functionally similar capabilities but involve dierent types of user interaction. We demonstrate how the choice of user interaction can have a signicant eect on the performance of the whole agent community. This leads to the proposal that an agent's interactive style should also be included within its capability advertisement. KEYWORDS Middle Agents, Matchmakers, Task Agents, Interface Agents, Multi-Agent Teams, Collaboration, Human-Agent Interaction 1 INTRODUCTION As the number and variety of agents that appear on the World...