Overhearing and Direct Interactions: Point of View of an Active Environment

The introduction of indirect interactions such as stigmergy in Multi–Agent Systems led to design systems not only with agents, but also with a logical environment that handles interactions. Overhearing is another indirect exchange model and it emphasises even more the presence of environment as a conceptual and modelling need. In this paper, we propose a model of agent communication and interaction from the point of view of the environment to deal with overhearing. To this end, we define key notions from the environment perspective, model them and their relations, and detail an algorithm that describes the environmental process for agent interactions.