Coordinating Intelligent Agents

This chapter will focus on how to get organizations - multiple software agents and perhaps humans - to coordinate thier activities when they are working on shared, loosely coupled problems, such as engineering design or information gathering. It will describe some useful representations (including tæms [Task Analysis and Environment Modeling System]) for annotating an agent’s representation of its activities, and some approaches (including GPGP [Generalized Partial Global Planning]) to designing coordination mechanisms that are adapted to some particular problem-solving environment. Examples will be drawn from various projects in distributed information gathering and distributed hospital patient scheduling.