Multiagent systems for autonomic computing
Jeff Kephart · 2007
Autonomic computing is a perfect application domain for autonomous agents and multiagent systems. Expanding on this theme, I will illustrate it with various prototypes my team has developed. Rather than building on existing agent platforms, we have started from existing products and tried to extend them to have some agent-like properties. Therefore, the agents are somewhat coarse and primitive, and "multi" means 2 or 3 in our prototypes, but these agents have the advantage of being very real and practical. And, even with just two agents, we have run into some nasty issues where the two try to adapt simultaneously and work at cross purposes unless we do something explicit to prevent it. We also have some novel machine learning approaches and applications. I will conclude by describing several research challenges for the agent research community.