Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems

Olivier Boissier, Andrei Ciortea, Fabien Gandon, Simon Mayer, Alessandro Ricci

► To cite this version:

Olivier Boissier, Andrei Ciortea, Fabien Gandon, Simon Mayer, Alessandro Ricci. Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems. Agents on the Web 2023, Feb 2023, Wadern, Germany. pp.117-118. emse-04240524

HAL Id: emse-04240524

https://hal-emse.ccsd.cnrs.fr/emse-04240524v1

Submitted on 27 Sep 2025

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Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems

Olivier Boissier (Ecole des Mines – St. Étienne, FR)

Andrei Ciortea (Universität St. Gallen, CH)

Fabien Gandon (INRIA – Sophia Antipolis, FR)

Simon Mayer (Universität St. Gallen, CH)

Alessandro Ricci (Università di Bologna, IT)

We are working towards defining a new class of Web-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) that can inherit the architectural properties of the Web (scalability, heterogeneity, evolvability, etc.), preserve the architectural properties of MAS (adaptability, openness, robustness, etc.), and are human-centric (usable, transparent, accountable, etc.). Our aim is to leverage the full potential of the Web as a middleware in MAS. In our approach, we consider the environment as a first-class abstraction in MAS – and we design the agents’ environment as a distributed hypermedia application guided by the design rationale of the Web architecture [1]. The distributed hypermedia environment provides agents with a uniform, knowledge-level abstraction of the system that they can navigate, query, observe, and act upon. The hypermedia-based design rationale reduces coupling and enhances the scalability, openness, and evolvability of the MAS. We refer to Web-based MAS that follow this design rationale as Hypermedia MAS.

During the seminar, we showed a demonstrator in which Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents are situated in an open and evolvable hypermedia-based environment distributed across two locations: Schloss Dagstuhl (Germnay) and the University of St.Gallen (Switzerland). Given a set of semantic models and a single entry URI into the system, the agents are able to achieve their design objectives by navigating the hypermedia environment to discover, create, perceive, and act on artifacts: the agents are able to create and use a digital counter for coordination, and they can control robotic arms located in St.Gallen. The distributed hypermedia environment is represented in RDF and agents are able to subscribe to triple patterns to receive fine-grained notifications of environmental changes. The demonstrator was built using Yggdrasil<sup>19</sup>, JaCaMo<sup>20</sup>, Corese<sup>21</sup>, and the hardware infrastructure provided by the Chair for Communication- and Interaction-based Systems at the University of St.Gallen<sup>22</sup>.

References

1. Andrei Ciortea, Olivier Boissier, and Alessandro Ricci. 2019. Engineering World-Wide Multi-Agent Systems with Hypermedia. In Engineering Multi-Agent Systems, Danny Weyns, Viviana Mascardi, and Alessandro Ricci (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 285–301.