Grounding Social Interactions in the Environment

While agents and environments are two intimately connected concepts, most approaches for multi-agent development focus on the agent-specific part of the system, whereas the handling of concerns related to the environment is often neglected or delegated to implementation level constructs. In this paper we demonstrate that building on an environment specification with expressive semantics is instrumental in designing agents that are capable of flexible and complex interactions. We propose a modeling approach that allows describing the concrete aspects of a multi-agent system as well as its conceptual and cognitive aspects within a single coherent conceptual framework by grounding all aspects in the environment. This framework enables an efficient development process built around the rapid prototyping and iterative refinement of multi-agent system specifications by applying model-driven design techniques to the system in its entirety.