Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities <s> Application Opportunities <s> Agent internal mechanisms form the basis for many of the languages proposed for describing agent behavior and interagent protocols. For the Web, however, we should also consider the needs of application designers such as sales managers, travel agents, and schoolteachers. To this end, the author is developing Q, a language for describing interaction scenarios between agents and users based on agent external roles. Q also provides an interface between computing professionals and scenario writers. Rather than depending on agent internal mechanisms, Q seeks to describe how scenario writers should request that agents behave. Scenarios help establish a bridge between the computing professionals who design agents and the scenario writers who design applications. Thus, we can expect an effective dialog to emerge from the interplay between the two different perspectives during the process of formalizing interaction patterns. <s> BIB001 </s> Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities <s> Application Opportunities <s> Institutions are established to regulate the interactions between parties that are performing some (business) transaction. The main focus of the dissertation is how an electronic organization (e-organization) should be specified on the basis of the abstract patterns given by the institution on which the organization is formed (i.e., how can we define a formal relation between the abstract norms specified in the institutional regulations and the concrete rules and procedures of the organization such that the agents will operate within the organization according to the institutional norms or can be punished when they are violating the norms). <s> BIB002 </s> Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities <s> Application Opportunities <s> Coordination between multiple autonomous agents is a major issue for open multi-agent systems. This paper proposes the notion of Behavioural Implicit Communication (BIC) originally devised in human and animal societies as a new and critical coordination mechanism also for artificial agents. BIC is a parasitical form of communication that exploits both some environmental properties and the agents' capacity to interpret their actions. In this paper we abstract from the agents' architecture to focus on the interaction mediated by the environment. Observability of the environment – and in particular of agents' actions – is crucial for implementing BIC-based form of coordination in artificial societies. Accordingly in this paper we introduce an abstract model of environment providing services to enhance observation power of agents, enabling BIC and other form of observation-based coordination. Also, we describe a typology of environments and examples of observation based coordination with and without implicit communication. <s> BIB003
We identified a number of domains that can exploit the environment and its mechanisms in a seemingly straightforward manner. First, normative systems impose norms on the behavior of agents, usually in a social agency metaphor BIB002 . Vázquez-Salceda refers to normative systems as electronic institutions: 'An e-institution is a safe environment mediating in the interaction of agents'  . In fact, the approach on e-institution is moving toward the introduction of an explicit regulating entity in MAS, whose functions naturally meet the notion of environment with a social level of support  . One opportunity of the environment for e-institutions is then for the regulation of agent activities, as it provides institution designers with an appropriate abstraction to deal with the regulating and normative aspects from design to runtime. In addition, the environment can also serve to regulate the interactions with external resources. This functionality is usually dealt with in an ad hoc way, and the environment can provide an adequate approach for integrating it in normative systems. Interface MAS generalize the work done on animated and conversational agents with multi-agent settings and they also pertain to agent societies. Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) appeared in the early 1990s as a new paradigm for improving human-computer interaction  by the combination of several modalities, such as speech, gesture, and facial expressions. In practice, ECA are used within end-user applications, and recent research has raised issues of interactions among ECA BIB001 . Although research on ECA has focused on multi-modal interactions with the human-user for a long time, the results usually cannot be translated to interactions among ECA. Agent communication languages focus on Speech Acts and they are not always adequate to describe other modes of interactions. A computational environment enriches possible interaction types among software agents, and the application of recent work to ECA based on the environment is expected to contribute significantly to the field  BIB003 .