Introduction Agents operate and exist in some environment, which typically is both computational and physical. The environment might be open or closed, and it might or might not contain other agents. Although there are situations where an agent can operate usefully by itself, the increasing interconnection and networking of computers is making such situations rare, and in the usual state of affairs the agent interacts with other agents. Whereas the previous chapter defined the structure and characteristics of an individual agent, the focus of this chapter is on systems with multiple agents. At times, the number of agents may be too numerous to deal with them individually, and it is then more convenient to deal with them collectively, as a society of agents. In this chapter, we will learn how to analyze, describe, and design environments in which agents can operate effectively and interact with each other productively. The environments will provide a computational infrastructu

Software reuse is a key issue in any long term software engineering endeavor, such as the ongoing development of robotics systems. Existing approaches to software reuse involve fixing part of the software landscape as a constant foundation to build upon. Some approaches fix the software architecture, i.e., how data flows through the system, and then allow the user to swap components in and out. Other approaches define a suite of stable components and interfaces which can be mixed, matched, and extended. All of these approaches assume that the key to software reuse is pervasive and long lasting standards. Unfortunately, in a young domain such as mobile robotics both software components and software architectures are items of research, and thus are in constant flux. This dissertation proposes the replacement of global, system-wide, permanent standards with local, transient standards in the form of reconfigurable interfaces. These interfaces are not simply libraries of system ca...