Autonomous and Adaptive Agents that Gather Information
Daniela L. Rus, Robert S. Gray, David F. Kotz · 1996
We have designed and implemented autonomous software agents. Our agents are programs that can move independently through a heterogeneous network of computers. They can sense the state of the network, monitor software conditions, and interact with other agents. The network-sensing tools allow our agents to adapt to the network configuration and to navigate under the control of reactive plans. In this paper we illustrate the intelligent and adaptive behavior of autonomous agents in distributed information-gathering tasks. 1 Introduction Modern information systems have data distributed over heterogeneous and unreliable networks. We wish to develop sophisticated methods for browsing, searching, and organizing distributed information systems. Traditional approaches to distributed information access co-locate the data and the computation needed to process it by bringing the data to the computation. We advocate a novel approach that brings the computation to the data in the form of transport...