E.H.Durfee
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
SYNOPSIS
Artificial intelligence, on the one hand, and behavioral and social science on the other, are inextricably related because the ability to coordinate in multiagent environments is fundamental to intelligence. Distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) has used several different social metaphors as the basis for building computational theories of intelligent coordination, with significant success. However, the real challenge in developing general theories of coordination is in bridging between the different perspectives implicit in the various social metaphors. In this paper, I describe a line of research that has led to a view of coordination as a distributed search problem, where the search space provides a common representation for organizations, plans, and schedules. The evolving approach is thus a candidate foundation for a truly interdisciplinary study of coordination from both computational and social perspectives.
KEYWORDS
Cooperative Problem Solving, Distributed AI, Organizations, Distributed Computing, Planning, Negotiation.