Agents interact with their environment and with other agents. The environment may simply be used to provide information on the spatial location of an agent relative to other agents or it may provide a rich set of geographic information, as in a GIS. An agent's location, included as a dynamic attribute, is sometimes needed to track agents as they move across a landscape, contend for space, acquire resources, and encounter other situations. Complex environmental models can be used to model the agents’ environment. For example, hydrology or atmospheric dispersion models can provide point location-specific data on groundwater levels or atmospheric pollutants, respectively, which are accessible by agents. The environment may thus constrain agent actions. For example, the environment in an agent-based transportation model would include the infrastructure and capacities of the nodes and links of the road network. These capacities would create congestion effects (reduced travel speeds) and limit the number of agents moving through the transportation network at any given time. There are three types of environment Physical environment communication environment and social environment Ref:https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/jos.2010.3
Basic characterstics of Environment
1. Accessibility- To what extent is the environment known and available to the agent?
2. Determinism- To what extent can the agent predict events in the environment?
3. Diversity- How homogeneous or heterogeneous are the entities in the environment?
4. Controllability- To what extent can the agent modify its environment?
5. Volatility- How much can the environment change while the agent is deliberating?
6. Temporality- For example, do actions occur continuously or discrete time steps or
episodes?
7. Locality- Does the agent have a distinct location in the environment. Also, how is a
particular locality expressed (e.g., coordinate system, distance metrics, relative positioning)?