Cognitive maps for indirect coordination of intelligent agents

Abstract

The core idea of the research described in this paper is that the processes of self-organization commonly called "swarm intelligence" can be triggered by creating - through the collective effort of the whole population of agents - a "global cognitive map" derived from the interaction between the agents and the environment, and shared by all agents. We focus on multi-agent systems with human agents, and explore the technological means to automate the process of creating and sharing such cognitive maps, with the aim to induce controllable self-organization of the behaviour of the agents.