Multi-Agent Systems and Cooperation

Under this heading, the following topics have been pursued:

• An assessment of the current DAI literature relevant for the development of cognitive agent architecture. In [28] a classification of main DAI work is proposed that distinguish among classical DAI problems, Mental attitudes and Social Attitudes. A further area is identified in which some research on investigating reasons for interaction in Multi-Agent systems is situated.
• Basic reasons for cooperation in Multi-Agent systems. In particular the basic scenario of help has been devised and an analysis of both help-seeking and help-giving situations has been performed. The present results are described in [3,30,27,31].
• The implementation of an Agent-Based environment for interface tasks. An investigation has started to build an agent-based support system for an office environment. The general idea is to use software agents to execute tedious and repetitive tasks. An initial implementation of a multi-agent system that filters the e-mail is described in [2].