Interactions Between Agents As Shared Resources in Multi-Agents Systems

In this paper we defend the advantages of a representation of agent behaviors, based on the concept of interaction. Although the behavior of an agent is usually included in its structure, we dissociate here the concept of agent from that of interaction, each one being associated with a specific ontology. This approach is especially valuable for increasing the reutilisability of the interactions, which are very often generic even in contexts where the agents are not. In a first part, we describe and compare our approach to the classic one. Then a list of properties is given to show the benefit to consider an interaction, not only as a communication means, but also as an entity shared by all agents and not reserved to some of them. An illustration of our approach is given in a road traffic application using VRML.