Formulating Situation Awareness for Multi-agent Systems

Improving autonomous agents´ awareness has aroused a great deal of interests in agent research. The objective is to formulate an approach that provides advanced awareness capabilities in the agents´ behaviour. In this paper, we explore the techniques proposed in the literature that have been adopted to enable agents´ awareness which are Active Perception (AP), Situation Awareness (SA) and Context Awareness (CA). In addition, we illustrate the possible integration of the techniques´ core phases with a multi-agent system (MAS). In doing so, we propose an approach to Situation Awareness for a decentralized MAS environment which is abbreviated as SAMAS. The approach assists in the agents´ decision-making process through decomposing the context of an event´s situations. Consequently, the SAMAS approach provides human-based assessments to the agents´ performance. The assessments are fed back to the agents´ to maintain the active perception of their actions. The paper contributes an independent SA approach considered from the perspective of MAS in a dynamic environment.