174 Chapter 6 agent-Based systems
Besides multiple agents, a multiagent system (MAS) does the following:
Provides an environment for the agents•
Sets the relationships between the entities •
Provides a platform for a set of operations that can be performed by the •
agents
Researchers have discovered that multiagent systems can accomplish
tasks as well as or even better than their centralized single-program counter-
parts (Ferber, 1999). Multiagent systems can support distributed collabora-
tive problem solving through agent collections that dynamically organize
themselves (Honavar, 1999). MAS can manifest self-organization and com-
plex behaviors, even when the individual strategies of all their agents are
simple. The