Research on Distributed Artificial Intelligence.

The goal of the DAI project is to provide fundamental research into the principles upon which a network of intelligent, cooperative computer agents can be based. The motivation for such distributed systems arises when we consider problem domains with the following characteristics 1 The environment is naturally partitioned, either spatially or functionally. An example of the former is a surveillance task in which several different areas must be patrolled of the latter, assembly tasks in which major subcomponents can be assembled in parallel 2 Each process view of the environment is dynamic other processes may be performing tasks, and chains of events may result from ongoing natural processes 3 Each process has partial or imperfect knowledge of the environment and 4 The cost of communication among processes may be high or the communication channels may be slow so that there is a significant delay in sending large amounts of information. Additional keywords Communications networks Robots Syntax Semantics Natural language Algorithms Computer logic.