Beyond citizen participation in planning: Multi-agent systems for complex decision making

The new complexity of planning knowledge implies innovation of planning methods, in both substance and procedure. The development of multi-agent cognitive processes, particularly when the agents are diverse and dynamically associated to their interaction arenas, may have manifold implications. In particular, interesting aspects are scale problems of distributed interaction, continuous feedback on problem setting, language and representation (formal, informal, hybrid, etc.) differences among agents (Bousquet, Le Page, 2004). In this concern, an increasing number of experiences on multi-agent interactions are today located within the processes of spatial and environmental planning. Yet, the upcoming presence of different human agents often acting au paire with artificial agents in a social physical environment (see, e.g., with sensors or data-mining routines) often suggests the use of hybrid MAS-based approaches (Al-Kodmany, 2002; Ron, 2005). In this framework, the chapter will scan experiences on the setting up of cooperative multi-agent systems, in order to investigate the potentials of that approach on the interaction of agents in planning processes, beyond participatory planning as such. This investigation will reflect on agent roles, behaviours, actions in planning processes themselves. Also, an attempt will be carried out to put down formal representation of supporting architectures for interaction and decision making.