From Reactive Robotics to Situated Multiagent Systems: A Historical Perspective on the Role of Environment in Multiagent Systems

Historically, the idea of situated multiagent systems—in which the environment gets a prominent role—originates from the domain of reactive robotics. In this paper, we give a historical perspective of research on agency that devotes pertinent attention to the environment, and show how the role of the environment evolved along with subsequent evolutions of agent systems. Today, it is quite obvious that the environment offers opportunities and challenges for all types of agency. We discuss recent research in this area, which advocates that the environment is not only an essential part of every multiagent system, but also provides an exploitable design abstraction to build multiagent systems. The notion of environment exceeds specific types of agency, and as such offers opportunities for synergetic research in the interest of multiagent systems in general.