Cognition, Sociability, and Constraints

  • Authors:

  • Gerhard Weiß

  • Affiliations:

  • -

  • Venue:
  • Balancing Reactivity and Social Deliberation in Multi-Agent Systems, From RoboCup to Real-World Applications (selected papers from the ECAI 2000 Workshop and additional contributions)
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

This paper focuses on the challenge of building technical agents that act flexibly in modern computing and information environments. It is argued that existing agent architectures tend to inherently limit an agent's flexibility because they imply a discrete cognitive and social behavior space. A novel, generic constraint-centered architectural framework (CCAF) is proposed that aims at enabling agents to act in a continuous behavior space. Though some aspects of this framework are still tentative in flavor, it ofiers two remarkable characteristics. First, it approaches flexibility in terms of cognition (ranging from reactive to proactive) and sociability (ranging from isolated to interactive). Second, it treats flexibility as an emergent property (more specifically, as a property that emerges as a result of an agent's continuous attempt to handle local and global constraints). A key implication of the considerations in this article is the need for integrating various existing constraint-handling approaches into a coherent whole in order to obtain really flexible agents.