Emotionally controlled inter-agent communication

This paper explores adaptive roles of artificial emotions in inter-agent communication within an intelligent vehicle scenario. Artificial emotions are control processes that play, for artificial agents, the same adaptive roles natural emotions play for natural organisms. Artificial emotions may be useful even in drastically restricted environments in which there are only a small number of possible types of interactions. The paper shows that the preliminary theory of artificial emotions due to Botelho and Coelho may provide the means required for detecting interaction problems and signalling the need for an adaptive reaction. Finally the paper shows that the usual multiprocessing, signalling, and inter-process communication capabilities provided by operating systems are enough to build an agent with the kinds of artificial emotions discussed and analyses the implementation of a generic platform for building those agents.