Abstract
Interaction is at the core of multi-agent systems. We use agent environment as a general term to denote the medium for agent interaction. Over the last years, the agent environment has been subject of active research. In this paper, we reflect on the role of the agent environment in multi-agent systems from a middleware perspective. Our study yields the following observations: (1) multi-agent system engineers consider distributed middleware (RMI, CORBA, etc.) as the basic platform for developing multi-agent systems, (2) common middleware services (security, persistency, etc.) are only minimally considered in multi-agent systems, (3) domain-specific middleware for multi-agent systems such as communication services and support for stigmergic coordination are typically developed as stand-alone services and as such difficult to compose with other services.
From these observations, we derive a number of challenges for research on environments in multi-agent systems: (1) to amplify reuse, application-specific services should be further consolidated into domain-specific services, (2) the problem of integration must be tackled, i.e. horizontal integration among domain-specific services for multi-agent systems, and vertical integration of domain-specific services upwards with the agents, and downwards with the common middleware services and the underlying distributed platform, (3) to support dynamic changing requirements of the system at hand, flexible composition and dynamic adaptation of services must be supported by the agent environment.