Constraint-based specification of reactive multi-agent systems
Amol Dattatraya Mall · 1997
e-mail: mallet ahoma.eas.asu.edu There has been an increasing interest in developing computational theories of agents which are typically reactive. However theoretical foundations of such agents are less developed. It is also not clear what combination of bottom up and top down approaches is the best. We develop a formal model of reactive agency and use it to analyze the interactions among complexities of goals, multi-agent system and its en-vironment. Using the notion of coupling that cap-tures dependency within the internal structure of an agent system, we show that more complex goals de-mand higher coupling or more behaviors or more com-plex environment. Visiting Herbert Simon’s conjec-ture that behaviors look complex because they occur in a complex environment, we conclude that complex-ity of an environment is also related to complexity of goals being fulfilled and in fact, an environment be-comes more complex as one tries to externalize inter-hal state with markers. Warning that global effects of adding markers need to be analyzed, we show that behaviors with longer stimuli have the potential to make environments more complex. These results en-able us to identify agent-environment-goal tradeoffs. We use these constraints to obtain a specification of multi-agent systems. These architecture independent constraints provide a useful tool for automated agent design. 1