Plan Analysis for Autonomous Sociological Agents

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the problem of how effective social interaction arises from individual social action and mind. The need to study the individual social mind suggests a move towards the notion of sociological agents who can model their social environment as opposed to acting socially within it. This does not constrain social behaviour; on the contrary, we argue that it provides the requisite information and understanding for such behaviour to be effective. Indeed, it is not enough for agents to model other agents in isolation; they must also model the relationships between them. A sociological agent is thus an agent that can model agents and agent relationships. Several existing models use notions of autonomy and dependence to show how this kind of interaction comes about, but the level of analysis is limited. In this paper, we show how an existing agent framework leads naturally to the enumeration of a map of inter-agent relationships that can be modelled and exploited by sociological agents to enable more effective operation, especially in the context of multi-agent plans.