Cognitive Maps: Theory, Implementation and Practical Applications in Multiagent Environments

Analytical techniques are generally inadequate for dealing with interrelationships or causal-ities among a set of individual and social concepts. Usually, cognitive maps (or causal maps) are used to cope with this type of causalities. However, the classical view of cognitive maps is based on an intuitive view with ad-hoc rules and no precise semantics of the primitive concepts, neither a sound formal treatment of relations between concepts. In this paper, we rst present a formal model for cognitive maps with a precise semantics based on relation algebra and the software tool, CM-RELVIEW, in which it has been implemented. Then we investigate the issue of using cognitive maps in multiagent environments, by explaining through diierent examples, how and why these maps are useful for the following aspects: (1) the reasoning on agents' subjective views; (2) the qualitative distributed decision making and; (3) the organization of agents considered as a wholistic approach. For each of these aspects, we focus on the computational mechanisms developed within CM-RELVIEW to support it.