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Cognition, Sociability, and Constraints

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Balancing Reactivity and Social Deliberation in Multi-Agent Systems (BRSDMAS 2000)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2103))

Abstract

This paper focuses on the challenge of building technical agents that act flexibly in modern computing and information environments. It is argued that existing agent architectures tend to inherently limit an agent’s flexibility because they imply a discrete cognitive and social behavior space. A novel, generic constraint-centered architectural framework (CCAF) is proposed that aims at enabling agents to act in a continuous behavior space. Though some aspects of this framework are still tentative in flavor, it offers two remarkable characteristics. First, it approaches flexibility in terms of cognition (ranging from reactive to proactive) and sociability (ranging from isolated to interactive). Second, it treats flexibility as an emergent property (more specifically, as a property that emerges as a result of an agent’s continuous attempt to handle local and global constraints). A key implication of the considerations in this article is the need for integrating various existing constraint-handling approaches into a coherent whole in order to obtain really flexible agents.

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  1. Institut für Informatik, Technische Universität München, 80290, München, Germany

    Gerhard Weiß

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  1. Gerhard Weiß
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Weiß, G. (2001). Cognition, Sociability, and Constraints. In: Balancing Reactivity and Social Deliberation in Multi-Agent Systems. BRSDMAS 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2103. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44568-4_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44568-4_13

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42327-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44568-5

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