Coordination Among Agents Using Reactive Rules
Mikael Berndtsson, Sharma Chakravarty, Brian Lings · 1996
Coordination and collaboration are naturally used by groups for carrying out activities and solving problems that require cooperation. However, getting a set of computer agents to do that same has been a problem -- primarily addressed by the AI community and recently by the database community as workflow and process management problems (e.g. in business processes, electronic commerce, logistics). Not surprisingly, the problem has been addressed at different levels of abstraction by the two communities. Coordination protocols (both static and dynamic) as well as task and result sharing have been investigated by the AI community; system level support as well as specification and execution of relaxed notions of transaction (sometimes termed an activity) have been addressed by the database community. It is evident that combining the two will provide an effective unified solution for a class of problems that require cooperation. This paper classifies problems addressed in the AI and databas...