“Exhibitionists” and “Voyeurs” do it better: A Shared Environment Approach for Flexible Coordination with Tacit Messages

Coordination between multiple autonomous agents is a major issue for open multi-agent systems. This paper proposes the notion of Behavioural Implicit Communication (BIC) originally devised in human and animal societies as a different and critical coordination mechanism also for artificial agents. BIC is a parasitical form of communication that exploits both some environmental properties and the agents' capacity to interpret each other's actions. In this paper we abstract from the agents' architecture to focus on the interaction mediated by the environment. In order to implement BIC in artificial societies two environmental properties are necessary: the observability of the software agents' actions and the traceability of the environment. The goal of this paper is to address the first property defining a model of observation mediated by the environment. A typology of environments and examples of observation based coordination with and without implicit communication are described.