Distributed Agents for Problem Solving

Abstract

Agent-based computing represents a new and very significant paradigm for building a wide range of software applications. In this paper, we describe our research project on the development of a software agent-based architecture for Distributed Problem Solving (DPS). Such agents must be heterogeneous and adaptive in nature to satisfy increasing requests due to cooperation capabilities exhibited by DPS applications (e.g., computer vision applications such as biomedical imaging and image retrieval on the Web, distributed and intelligent information retrieval, and so on). We give a brief introduction to the overall architecture design and focus our attention on the lowest level agents, called W-bots (Working Software Robots). We define the nature of such agents and describe their ways of interaction and their adaptive capabilities.