Intelligent virtual agent societies on the internet

Abstract

The principal advances in the research field of IVAs within virtual environments have taken place in the area of agent architectures. However, very few papers have addressed the development of metamodels to conceptualize this kind of systems from an organizational and social point of view, despite their intrinsic sociability and their close relationship to life-like virtual words. Likewise, no platform has been yet developed that contributes to the development of virtual environments and looks at all these concepts. This paper introduces a taxonomy containing all the agent types that would take part in a virtual environment, considered as a whole society. On the basis of this taxonomy, we put for- ward a metamodel, which can be used to define how this society would be organised. An agent platform, known as PIVAS, has also been developed to support the described metamodel, while providing the necessary services for the creation of Virtual Agent Societies, such as migration, location, etc.