Coordination Among Agents Using Reactive Rules

• Coordination and collaboration are naturally used by groups for carrying out activities and solving problems that require cooperation. However, getting a set of computer agents to do that same has been a problem -- primarily addressed by the AI community and recently by the database community as workflow and process management problems (e.g. in business processes, electronic commerce, logistics).Not surprisingly, the problem has been addressed at different levels of abstraction by the two communities. Coordination protocols (both static and dynamic) as well as task and result sharing have been investigated by the AI community; system level support as well as specification and execution of relaxed notions of transaction (sometimes termed an activity) have been addressed by the database community. It is evident that combining the two will provide an effective unified solution for a class of problems that require cooperation. This paper classifies problems addressed in the AI and database literature according to degree of coordination and collaboration. It reports on work done by the authors in utilising the reactive paradigm to synthesize, from the yechniques in these areas, a common framework for the support of multi-agent problem solving, workflow, and process management. In addition to resolving the terminology used by different groups, task sharing is used to demonstrate the approach described. It is accomplished by creating either static or dynamic plans that are coordinated by ECA rules -- both pre-defined and dynamically created. The paper details the applicability of ECA rules in this domain, their adequacy, and a prototype implementation.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Systemvetenskap, informationssystem och informatik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Information Systems (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Computer and systems science

Data- och systemvetenskap

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

rap (ämneskategori)