ONR (Office of Naval Research) research in distributed reasoning and planning. Interim report, February 1985-February 1987

Abstract : The goal of the Distributed Reasoning and Planning projects has been to provide fundamental research into the principles upon which a network of intelligent, cooperative computer agents can be based. The motivation for distributed system of intelligent agents arises when we consider problem domains with the following characteristics: 1) The environment is naturally partitioned, either spatially or functionally. An example of the former is a surveillance task in which several different areas must be patrolled; of the latter, assembly tasks in which major subcomponents can be assembled in parallel; 2) Each process's view of the environment is dynamic: other processes may be performing tasks at the same time, and chains of events may result from ongoing natural processes; 3) Each process has partial or imperfect knowledge of the environment; and 4) The cost of communication among processes may be high or the communication channels may be slow, so that there is a significant delay in sending large amounts of information. Keywords: Embedding; Computer logic.