Towards agents' embodiment in web-based multi-agent systems

The situatedness of agents in Web-based MASs is a well-studied problem: it calls for applying hypermedia and REST architectural principles to the engineering of the environment, leading to inheriting the non-functional properties of being open, long-lived, and Internet-scale. At the same time, a more specific property than situatedness, embodiment, is not well understood in this context regarding its motivations and implications. During this thesis, we analyzed the notion of embodiment of agents in Web-based MASs, following the hypermedia principles of the Web and drawing inspiration from robotics. We rooted our work in the one previously done on embodiment in virtual environments by A&A, one of the most prominent meta-models proposing the environment as a first-class abstraction, and its reference implementation, the CArtAgO platform. We found that the motivating factors for embodiment are agent discoverability, communication through behavior, agent accountability, and context-dependent interaction. We also found that a body is an abstraction that must concretize and identify its owner in the environment, mediate the owner's action and perception, and allow its own observability. We created a test framework for Web-based MASs supporting the embodiment of their agents, enabling us to test a prototype system built on a specific use case to demonstrate the technical utility of our work. The realized framework will also promote further research on the Web-based MASs topic for the WebAgents community group. We believe that embodiment, granting more flexibility to agents, could bring us closer to solving the "arrive and operate" problem, the problem for which an agent should be capable of arriving in a new environment and starting to operate with minimal a priori information. Moreover, our concept of an agent's body could be integrated into the A&A meta-model, leading to an extension of the latter.