Multi-agent network for cooperative work

摘要

In the last decade, an important amount of work has been done on Groupware systems development. The networking improvements have heavily influenced corporate applications of information systems known as Intranets. The use of open system architectures and TCP/IP protocols within corporate networks as well as the widespread use of database interfaces are changing the application perspective of groupware. Multi-agent Systems (MAS) have been proposed as a key technology to deal with many of the problems arising from the new world-wide information infrastructure. We are interested in applying MAS technology to the intranet world, to create an infrastructure of multi-agents to support the cooperative work within the organization. We present the RESCH project, which consists of a multi-agent system to support cooperative work among the persons in a company. The two main results described in the paper are: (1) a multi-agent system allowing the connection and cooperation among a set of existing expert systems; (2) a multi-agent system supporting the cooperative work for organization of meetings in a company. The planning mechanism used in this multi-agent applications is based on the Augmented Transition Network formalism. We present it through the classical example of the Contract Net Protocol.