Representing and Using Organizational Knowledge in Distributed AI Systems

Abstract

This paper reports on the state of our research toward a general coordination mechanism for distributed intelligent systems. In our view, a coordination framework or organization is a particular set of settled and unsettled questions about belief and action that agents have about other agents. Organizational change means opening and/or settling some different set of questions, giving individual agents new problems to solve and, more importantly, different assumptions about the beliefs and actions of other agents. To test these ideas we are developing a testbed called the Intelligent Coordination Experiment (ICE) in which we implement our coordination mechanisms.