HUNABC'98
First Hungarian National Conference on Agent Based Computing
Budapest, Hungary, May 29-31, 1998

The Role of Emotions in Multi-Agent Systems

Tamás Mészáros, Tadeusz P. Dobrowiecki
Dept of Measurement and Instrument Eng.
Technical University of Budapest
Muegyetem rkp. 9., H-1521 Budapest, Hungary
meszaros@mmt.bme.hu, dobrowiecki@mmt.bme.hu
tel: (+36)-1-463-2057

Abstract
  It is widely accepted that the introduction of emotions means
necessarily an upgrading of the cognitive abilities of an agent system.
Although everybody is aware that there is an essential gap between the
artificial nature of an agent system and the human character of
implemented emotions, this problem lacked a closer look, and some
authors warned even against a too strict resemblance. In this paper the
authors, concluding that emotions mean a very useful information for
deliberative systems equipped with perception, propose a new approach to
broad emotional agents. It is based on a strictly 'engineering stance'
and aimed at a purposeful emotional system tailored to the agent's
needs. Authors argue that system designers can profit from such stance
but then they should accept and undertake certain nontrivial design
decisions, leading to features not considered until now.

  The paper deliberately does not address the issue of formal
description. It attempts to clarify the problems and the principal
design decisions in a possibly general way [9]. Analysis of
representation is left after at least some of the open questions are
worked out, considering that the choice of the representation and the
concrete implementation will influence many particular decisions.