Autonomous Agents: from Concepts to Implementation

Abstract

A model for autonomy-based multi-agent systems aimed at exhibiting emerging properties is proposed. Then, the prerequisites for a distributed implementation are discussed. A preliminary distributed implementation, illustrated by an application to a robotics simulation, is consequently sketched with a strong emphasis on STL, our coordination model, whose aim is to provide powerful coordination mechanisms that do not alter the model's conceptual prescriptions. 1 Introduction Artificial Intelligence (AI) aims at synthesizing intelligence in artefacts. However two families of approaches exist disagreeing in their notion of what intelligence actually means [ Ziemke, 1997 ] , [ Franklin, 1995 ] . On the one hand, Top-Down AI considers intelligence as the capacity to form and manipulate internal representational models of the world. On the other hand, Bottom-Up AI (or Autonomous Agents) considers intelligence as a biological feature [ Maturana and Varela, 1980 ] ; this notion is often refer..