Coordination and Management Environments for Responsive Agents

Robert Neches, P/I
Pedro Szekely, Project Leader

University of Southern California

Information Sciences Institute

Marina del Rey, California

Other contractors: Crystaliz, USC ISI (Bob Balzer), AverStar

Coordination and Management Environments for Responsive Agents (CAMERA) is an aggressive, systems-oriented attack on the complex problem of ensuring effective, purposive action in an environment where behavior is dynamically determined and control relies upon cooperation between autonomous agents. Our vision is an agent environment in which collections of agents form and organize to accomplish focused, purposive results. In such an environment, it is essential to have configurable negotiation mechanisms between agents, complemented by mechanisms enabling the agent collection to detect problems and negotiate self-correcting behaviors.

CAMERA’s technical impact lies in providing a framework and testbed which provides protocols that enable coordination among multiple agents. The approach addresses not just initial formulation of focused collective action, but continuous maintenance of appropriate behavior. It offers a secure environment that is robust against communication breakdowns.

CAMERA also is significant for offering a framework for managing negotiations that permits an agent collection to re-think priorities -- as opposed to blindly trying to optimize pre-determined priorities that may well turn out to be ill-conceived.

Last Modified by Pedro Szekely on Thursday, October 07, 1999 (contact szekely@isi.edu)