Abstract
The ecological psychologist James J. Gibson defined the notion of affordances to refer to what action possibilities environments offer to animals. In this paper, we show how (artificial) agents can discover and exploit affordances in a Multi-Agent System (MAS) environment to achieve their goals. To indicate to agents what affordances are present in their environment and whether it is likely that these may help the agents to achieve their objectives, the environment may expose signifiers while taking into account the current situation of the environment and of the agent. On this basis, we define a Signifier Exposure Mechanism that is used by the environment to compute which signifiers should be exposed to agents in order to permit agents to only perceive information about affordances that are likely to be relevant to them, and thereby increase their interaction efficiency. If this is successful, agents can interact with partially observable environments more efficiently because the signifiers indicate the affordances they can exploit towards given purposes. Signifiers thereby facilitate the exploration and the exploitation of MAS environments. Implementations of signifiers and of the Signifier Exposure Mechanism are presented within the context of a Hypermedia Multi-Agent System, and the utility of this approach is presented through the development of a scenario.
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Acknowledgements
This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant No. 957218 (IntellIoT) and from the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant No. 189474 (HyperAgents).
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This is an extended version of the paper “Signifiers for Affordance-driven Multi-Agent Systems"[1] that was presented at the 10th International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2022).
Appendix A Extension notes for “signifiers for affordance-driven multi-agent systems"
Appendix A Extension notes for “signifiers for affordance-driven multi-agent systems"
1.1 A.1 Revision and extension of Section 2 “agent-environment interaction in socio-technical systems"
Section 2 was revised to provide a more detailed description of the “Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State" principle as part of the Representational State Transfer architectural style (see Section 2.1.1). The revision aims at establishing a clearer view of how signifiers are used in hypermedia-driven interaction based on the Web architecture.
Additionally, the description of the means through which human agents exploit affordances on the Web in a goal-driven manner was extended (see Section 2.2.1). Through this section, we now elaborate on how affordances are strategically presented to human agents based on the run-time agent-environment context towards enabling agents to more efficiently achieve their goals on the Web environment.
Finally, the background knowledge on Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems was revised and extended to better articulate why this class of Multi-Agent Systems offers an appropriate infrastructure a) for exploiting signifiers in agent-to-environment interactions, and, b) for pointing out the advantages of adjusting the exposure of signifiers based on the agent-environment context in dynamic and affordance-rich Multi-Agent Systems (see Section 2.2.3).
1.2 A.2 Revision and extension of Section 3 “affordance-driven interaction in multi-agent systems"
Section 3.2 was renamed to “Perceiving Affordances through the Signifier Exposure Mechanism”.
Section 3 was revised to improve readability and increase the clarity of the presented definitions. Specifically, references to state implications in the definition of a state were removed because we considered them unnecessary (see Section 3.1). The definition of the Signifier Exposure Mechanism, was updated to present the notion in a clearer manner, and a new definition, the notion of Agent Profile which is used throughout our work (see Section 3.2) was defined. Figure 1 was added to represent the Signifier Exposure Mechanism. The definitions have been integrated within the paragraphs they refer to instead of being separated from them.
Section 3.3 was refactored and extended. The title of the subsection was changed from “Usage of Affordances in Agent Plans" to “Exploiting Affordances in Goal-driven Behavior through Signifiers" to broaden the scope of the subsection, describe plans as representing one type of goal-directed behavior, and to indicate that the affordances can be exploited by the information provided by signifiers. Finally, the discussion concerning classical planning is extended. The process by which an agent can use signifiers as an alternative to classical planning is explained in greater detail, and an algorithm in pseudo-code is provided to illustrate the process. There is also a discussion on how an agent using a classical planner could benefit from perceiving signifiers.
1.3 A.3 Revision and extension of Section 4 “implementation and experience"
A second scenario was added to demonstrate the use of signifiers in a multi-agent context (see Section 4.2). Also, the evaluation of the implementation was updated: the bullet point concerning the computational cost of using signifiers was reformulated, and the bullet point 4 was added concerning the benefits of signifiers in enabling stigmergic interaction as illustrated by the second scenario.
1.4 A.4 Revision and extension of Section 5 “discussion"
The discussion was augmented with a discussion on signifiers and HATEOAS, as well as a discussion of the benefits of signifiers and the Signifier Exposure Mechanism as illustrated by the two scenarios. The benefits and challenges associated with enabling agents to add signifiers to the Signifier Exposure Mechanism are better explained.
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Lemée, J., Vachtsevanou, D., Mayer, S. et al. Signifiers for conveying and exploiting affordances: from human-computer interaction to multi-agent systems. Ann Math Artif Intell (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10472-024-09938-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10472-024-09938-6