Add Membership Degree to Agent–Environment Relation for Nuanced Uncertainty Representation

Description: Introduce a membership degree attribute to the agent–environment relationship to provide a more flexible and nuanced representation of uncertainty, partial belonging, or graded participation. This concept is inspired by fuzzy-set semantics and allows modeling situations where an agent is not simply “in” or “out” of an environment (or role), but instead participates to a certain extent.

The membership degree should be a continuous value in 0.0, 1.0, where:

  • 0.0 = no membership / complete non-belonging
  • 1.0 = full membership / complete belonging
  • Values in between express partial membership or uncertainty

This enables richer modeling in scenarios such as adaptive environments, graded roles, probabilistic participation, or environmental influence modulated by degree.

Rationale / Motivation:

  • Supports more expressive agent–environment interactions.
  • Allows partial role activation and graded influence effects.
  • Facilitates integration of uncertainty directly into the simulation model.
  • Crucial for systems where belonging cannot be treated as binary (e.g., social simulations, probabilistic perception, gradual adaptation).

Proposed Tasks:

  1. Design data structure extension
  • Add a membershipDegree: double field to the agent’s registration/attachment to an environment (or its role instance).
  • Ensure valid range enforcement 0.0–1.0.
  1. Update API
  • Methods to set, update, retrieve membership degree.
  • Consider defaults (e.g., 1.0 if undefined).
  1. Modify environment logic
  • Interaction strength or influence optionally weighted by membership degree.
  • Ensure no breaking changes for existing models.
  1. SimulationData / metrics integration
  • Ability to collect average, min, max membership degrees across agents.
  1. Documentation
  • Add concept description, examples, and guidelines for usage.
  • Explain semantics clearly: uncertainty, partial belonging, graded roles.

Acceptance Criteria:

  • Agents can be associated with an environment or role using a membership degree in 0,1.
  • System behaves consistently with graded participation semantics.
  • Backward compatibility is preserved.
  • Documentation updated and examples provided.