Multi-agent System - Concept

Concept

Multi-agent systems consist of agents and their environment. Typically multi-agent systems research refers to software agents. However, the agents in a multi-agent system could equally well be robots, humans or human teams. A multi-agent system may contain combined human-agent teams.

Agents can be divided into different types:

• Very simple like: passive agents or agent without goals (like obstacle, apple or key in any simple simulation)
• Active agents with simple goals (like birds in flocking, or wolf–sheep in prey-predator model)
• Or very complex agents (like cognitive agent, which has a lot of complex calculations)

Environment also can be divided into:

• Virtual Environment
• Discrete Environment
• Continuous Environment

Agent environments can be organized according to various properties like: accessibility (depending on if it is possible to gather complete information about the environment), determinism (if an action performed in the environment causes a definite effect), dynamics (how many entities influence the environment in the moment), discreteness (whether the number of possible actions in the environment is finite), episodicity (whether agent actions in certain time periods influence other periods), and dimensionality (whether spatial characteristics are important factors of the environment and the agent considers space in its decision making).