CORTEX: Towards Supporting Autonomous and Cooperating Sentient Objects
Paulo Verı́ssimo, Vinny Cahill, António Casimiro, Keith Cheverst, Adrian Friday, Jörg Kaiser · Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (RCAAP Project by FCT) · 2002
We are now at the point where the emergence of a new class of applications that operate independently of direct human control can be envisaged. However, this is also the crossroads between the requirements put on system support, by the advances of research on high-level models for this class of applications--- e.g. on autonomous agents and distributed AI--- and the shortcomings of current architectures and middleware models. This paper addresses the latter problem. It does a constructive analysis of the key characteristics of the aforementioned applications, amongst which sentience, studying the interaction types to be supported, and establishing requirements on the programming model, and on distributed architecture. It then describes the approach taken by CORTEX to reach a solution, in the form of infrastructural support to construct large-scale proactive applications and thereby to validate the use of sentient objects as a viable approach to the construction of such applications