The concept of multi-agent system contributes to the fields of
computer science and artificial intelligence by a societal and
distributed approach to computing. Non-trivial problems can be solved,
complex systems can simulated and controlled by a community of
autonomous computational entities. These entities can be geographically
distributed across wider network infrastructures.
The
computational entities in multi-agent systems need to perform specific
types of social interaction in order to achieve collective behaviour
and collective decision making. Socially oriented reasoning, the
reasoning process that underlies rational interaction, is currently a
subject of a deeper theoretical investigation and practical deployment
in industrial applications.
We will introduce the concept
social reasoning and social knowledge, comment various types of social
knowledge and present two specific techniques for maintenance and
exploitation of social knowledge in computational multi-agent systems:
(i) the acquaintance models, the knowledge structures representing
agent awareness of its interaction neighbourhood -- mainly in
competitive and adversarial environment (ii) the stand-in agents, that
are autonomous computational entities freely migrating within the
network and providing vital social information in e.g. disruptive and
partially inaccessible environment.