Abstract (EN)

The environment is a powerful first-order abstraction in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), as well as a critical building block. The agents interact in their environment and the effects of their actions are observed and evaluated through this environment. The local complexity of the agents depends on its management of the interaction and action processes. If the environment carries out a part of this processes, the complexity of the agents is reduced. This delegating process implies a centralization of a part of the MAS computations inside the environment and therefore a flexible way to exchange information and to coordinate the agents.In this paper, we present the modeling of an environment which supports both communication services and simulation services: multi-party communications (communication) and contextual activation (simulation). We evaluate the cost of these environment services and compare it to the execution of the same tasks inside the agents. The evaluation and comparison are done theoretically and empirically for communication and simulation. We also investigate the clustering of the agents in several environments.