Applying multi agent techniques to reconfigurable systems

This paper extends the concepts of multi agent technology to reconfigurable systems--systems in which the functionality of both the associated hardware and software can be altered some time after the system has been constructed. The utilization of this new paradigm has the potential to greatly increase the flexibility, efficiency, expandability, and maintainability of reconfigurable systems and to provide an attractive alternative to the current set of disjoint approaches that are currently applied to this problem domain. The focus of this paper is on the suitability of reconfigurable hardware to support hardware agents. We believe that such hardware agents can be used in conjunction with traditional software agents in hybrid architectures to support many of today's more complex applications. The paper introduces a general agent model that can be applied to hardware. We also show how hardware agents can be created using a conventional hardware description language that when synthesized produces synchronous and asynchronous hardware constructs.

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