Abstract: |
The multi-agent technology has been recently considered to be much more suitable for creating open, flexible environment able to integrate software pieces of diverse nature written in different languages and running on different types of computers. It enables to design, develop and implement a comparatively open multi-agent environment suitable for efficient creating of complex knowledge-based or decision support systems. Such an environment is able to integrate geographically distributed knowledge sources or problem solving units. The task under consideration is located just on the borderline between Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence. The idea of software integration based on efficient communication among parallel computational processes as well as that of the open architecture (enabling to add new elements without any change in the others) has been provided by the Software Engineering area. On the other hand, the multi-agent approach stemming from the theory of agency, from behavioural models of agents and methods of agentification of stand-alone programs can be considered as a contribution of Artificial Intelligence. Multi-agent systems have useful properties, such as parallelism, robustness, and scalability. Therefore they are applicable in many domains which cannot be handled by centralized systems, in particular, they are well suited for domains which require, for example, resolution of interest and goal conflicts, integration of multiple knowledge sources and other resources, time-bounded processing of very large data sets, or on-line interpretation of data arising in different geographical locations. |
ICSC
