Levels of Emergent Behaviour in Agent Societies

Artificial agents societies are well suited to design and implement open distributed systems. As the complexity of such systems grows, the design of agent societies with a complete pre-defined behaviour is a significant challenge due to the dynamic interactions among agents and between agents and the environment. To overcome existing difficulties, agent systems with emergent behaviour are a fertile area of research and span a large range of applications. The paper presents an analysis of the anticipatory capabilities of multi-agent systems endowed with emergent behaviour, by considering both reactive multi-agent systems and cognitive multi-agent systems. Our approach in analysis is driven by the different levels on which predicted behaviour can be achieved and is illustrated by two scenarios, one for each case of agent system, grounding the view for the cognitive case in our previous related work on self-organizing systems with cognitive agents.