COOPERATION IN A MULTI-AGENT COMMUNITY
Eugénio Oliveira, Fernando Mouta, Ana Paula Rocha
{eco, mouta, arocha}@fe.up.pt
Departamento de Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores
Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto
Rua dos Bragas, 4099 Porto Codex
Portugal
ABSTRACT
This paper describes a framework for cooperation suitable for being exploited in a
society of cooperative distributed agents. We briefly present a tool UPShell - University
of Porto Shell, which may be used to generate specific Intelligent Systems, although its
main purpose is to build up a community of coarse-grain, semi-autonomous agents out
either of those generated Intelligent Systems or of already pre-existent Knowledge Based
Systems. After selecting the agents and the machines where each agent is going to run,
UPShell sets up an architecture enabling agents to communicate and cooperate. Inside
each agent, a blackboard-based architecture supports a flexible control and natural
integration of different modules responsible for internal activity (problem solving) as well
as external activity (cooperation and communication).
Key words: Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Multi-Agent Systems,
Cooperating Expert Systems
Category: Techniques & Methods