Environment

Overview

Environment is a first-class abstraction in the modeling and engineering of complex computational systems, such as pervasive, adaptive, and multi-agent systems [Weyns]. It is usually modeled through the resource abstraction, as a non-goal-driven entity producing events and/or reactively waiting for requests to perform its function. Environment is essential in coordination since it works as a mediator for agent interaction through which agents can communicate and coordinate indirectly. It is active; featuring autonomous dynamics, and affecting agent coordination. It has a structure; requiring a notion of locality, and allowing agents of any sort to move through a topology.

To this end, Environment is modeled as an agent. Environment is mainly in charge of

• allocating physical addresses (e.g., coordinate address) and/or logical addresses (e.g., agent address, wallet address or even alias) to agents and artifacts and,
• mediating agent-agent and agent-artifact interaction through these addresses.

Defining an Environment

In this generic implementation, there is no limitation about the number of agents and/or artifacts that can be allocated to an address (e.g., in a Grid environment several agents may be at the same position). Similarly, there is also no limitation about the number of addresses an agent can allocate (e.g., in a Bitcoin environment an agent may have several wallet addresses).

To create a generic environment, do simply the following inside the setup() method of a Mage agent.

public class MyMage extends Mage {
	
	@Override
	protected void setup() {
		// create an environment named "MyEnvironment"
		Environment environment = create(new Environment("MyEnvironment"));
         ...
    }
    ...
}   

Adding Agents to an Environment

To create agents for the environment, nothing special needs to be done.

1. Create Agents

Agents can be created one by one:

Agent agent = create(new Agent() {
    //... agent setup code ...
});

or in a loop, usually for a desired amount of agent count:

for (int i = 0; i < numOfAgents; i++) {
    Agent agent = create(new Agent() {
        //... agent setup code ...
    });
}

2. Add Agents to the Environment

After an agent is created, it can be added to the environment using the add method of the GroupManager role:

environment.as(Groupanager.class).add(agent).execute();

Upon being added to the grid environment, the GroupManager role assigns the Communicator role to the agents so that they can communicate with other agents in the same environment.