Human-Agent Societies: Challenges and Issues

Abstract

Agreement technologies have settled the foundations for creating systems that operate on the basis of agreements in societies of independent, autonomous computational entities (agents). Nowadays more and more systems of such kind rely on a seamless interaction of software agents with humans. Humans work in partnership or closely related with agents that are able to act autonomously and intelligently. Specifically, humans and agents have the ability to establish a series of relationships/collaborative interactions with each other, forming what might be called human-agent teams to meet their individual or collective goals within an organisation or social structure. Systems in which people and agents operate on a large scale offer an enormous potential but also require the consideration of additional issues. In this paper we present our vision of human-agent societies. Based on a real-world case study, we analyse the open issues that should be addressed by researches in order to develop such systems. Finally, we present an abstract architecture proposal for intelligent human-agent societies, which is centred on a service oriented framework that enables the interactions among the different components in such systems.