A HYBRID ARCHITECTURE FOR DISTRIBUTED AUTONOMOUS CONTROL AGENTS
Khosrow Hadavi · Cybernetics & Systems · 1992
Business environments, like most other real systems, are distributed in nature. However, the fact that the environment itself is distributed does not justify a distributed control architecture. On the other hand, a centralized architecture is not exactly an ideal form of control. The architecture proposed herein is a hybrid control architecture that maps the decision-making environment of many situations ranging from factory floors to traffic control. The architecture assumes the presence of self-reliant (autonomous) decision-making agents, which are required to respond in a certain amount of time. Cooperation between these agents is assumed, and therefore each agent is expected to perform as best as it can in order to complete a well-defined task. No central coordination or control agent is assumed. Thus an asynchronous behavior is assumed.