An environment to support multi-party communications in multi-agent systems

Two-party communication is the most-studied model to support interaction between two cognitive agents, whereas that is only one case of what an agent should be able to do. Multi-party communications enhance this model, by taking into account all the roles an agent can have in a communication. Nevertheless, there are no generic models and infrastructures that enable to apply multiparty communication in a standardized way. We emphasize that the environment, in the sense of a common medium for the agents, is a suitable paradigm to support multi-party communication. We propose a general and operational model called Environment as Active Support of Interaction (EASI), that enables each agent to actively modify the environment according to its communication needs. Algorithms are proposed and assessed with an example stemming from the ambient intelligence domain.