The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

The availability of network-based information sources and services, along with the wide use of World Wide Web, presents a great opportunity for enhanced problem solving support that incorporates information gathering into the problem solving framework. The concept of an intelligent information agent has been explored for information accessing and filtering tasks (e.g., filtering of newsgroup information). To provide support for more complex tasks that involve information gathering along with decision making capabilities, an agent must communicate and cooperate with other agents. One of the main issues is how to structure a multi-agent architecture that will allow access, filtering and fusing of information from many sources and services, integrated with flexible decision support. In this paper we present such an architecture. It has two layers: The top layer consists of task-specific software agents which help users perform tasks by formulating problem solving plans and carrying out these plans through querying and exchanging information with other software agents. The bottom layer consists of information-specific agents which provide intelligent access to a heterogeneous collection of information sources. The layered architecture has been implemented in the domain of everyday organizational tasks (e.g., hosting visitors, finding information about persons on the internet, managing personal calendars) at Carnegie Mellon. We illustrate this architecture and the agent coordination protocols in the hosting visitor domain.

Notes

Sponsor: ARPA

Grant ID: F33615-93-1-1330

Number of pages: 10

Text Reference

Dajun Zeng and Katia Sycara, "Cooperative Intelligent Software Agents," tech. report CMU-RI-TR-95-14, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, March, 1995

BibTeX Reference

@techreport{Zeng_1995_373,
   author = "Dajun Zeng and Katia Sycara",
   title = "Cooperative Intelligent Software Agents",
   booktitle = "",
   institution = "Robotics Institute",
   month = "March",
   year = "1995",
   number= "CMU-RI-TR-95-14",
   address= "Pittsburgh, PA",
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu