Multiagent Environment Design for Pervasive Human-ICT Systems: The SAPERE Approach

The environment in which agents are situated has been recognized as an explicit and exploitable element in the design of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). It can be assigned a number of responsibilities whose mechanisms for fulfillment would be more difficult to design solely using the notion of agents. To support the engineering of means to fulfill these responsibilities, we propose a novel nature-inspired approach developed by the EU project SAPERE. In particular, the intent of this chapter is to present a framework-based approach providing for context-awareness, dependability, openness, flexible and robust evolution. In such a framework all of these issues can be solved via a limited set of “laws” embedded in the framework to support and govern its self-organizing activities.