Task Coordination Paradigms for Information Agents

In agent systems, different (autonomous) agents collaborate to execute complex tasks. Each agent provides a set of useful capabilities, and the agent system combines these capabilities as needed to perform complex tasks, based on the requests input into the system. Agent communication languages (ACLs) allow agents to communicate with each other about how to partition these tasks, and to specify the responsibilities of the individual agents that are invoked. Current ACLs make certain assumptions about the agent system, such as the stability of the agents, the lifetime of the tasks and the intelligence of the agents in the system, etc. These assumptions are not always applicable in information-centric applications, since such agent systems contain unreliable agents, very long running tasks, agents with widely varying levels of sophistication, etc. Furthermore, not all agents may be able to support intelligent planning to work around these issues, and precanned interactions used in more c...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Marian H. Nodine, Damith Chandrasekara, Amy Unruh
• Keywords: Agent Systems, ATAL 2000, Complex Tasks, Intelligent Agents, Long Running Tasks