Rapid integration and coordination of heterogeneous distributed agents for collaborative enterprises

Abstract:

As the agent methodology proves more and more useful in organizationalenterprises, research/industrial groups are developing autonomous, heterogeneous agents that are distributed over a variety of platforms and environments. Rapid integration of such distributed, heterogeneous agent components could address large-scale problems of interest in these enterprises. Unfortunately, rapid and robust integration remains a difficult challenge. To address this challenge, we are developing a novel teamwork-based agent integration framework. In this framework, software developers specify an agent organization through a team-oriented program. To locate and recruit agent components for this organization, an agent resources manager (an analogue of a “human resources manager”) searches for agents of interest to this organization and monitors their performance over time. TEAMCORE wrappers render the agent components in this organization team ready, thus ensuring robust, flexible teamwork among the members of the newly formed organization. This implemented framework promises to reduce the development effort in enterprise integration while providing robustness due to its teamwork-based foundations. We have applied this framework to a concrete, running example, using heterogeneous, distributed agents in a problem setting comparable to many collaborative enterprises.