Research on Distributed Artificial Intelligence.

The ultimate goal of the DAI project is to discover the essential principles upon which construction of a network of cooperative intelligent computer agents could be based. The motivations for distributed AI arise from at least three sources. First, many military problems have an inherently distributed character by virtue of the physical distribution not only of military units themselves but also of the various sensors that provide information affecting those units. Second, the changing economics of computer hardware and communications technology are making distributed systems increasingly cost-effective since distributed systems with computationally powerful processors will soon be more commonplace, it is worthwhile considering how AI could be used to exploit such systems more fully. Third, there is a strong motivation from within AI. Artificial-intelligence systems that act in an environment must reason about that environment. Thus, when the environment contains other agents, as most realistic environments do, the AI system must reason about the state of those agents and how to affect it. This leads naturally to distributed AI.