Agent-Based Information Infrastructure

Christopher Landauer  (cal@aero.org)
Kirstie L. Bellman  (bellman@aero.org)
Aerospace Integration Science Center
The Aerospace Corporation, Mail Stop M6/214
P. O. Box 92957, Los Angeles, California 90009-2957, USA

Abstract

In this paper, we describe an approach to integration in constructed complex systems that relies on cooperative
collections of agents instead of a central planner or organizer.  The approach is highly information intensive,
because it makes explicit all of the information required for the agents to locate, select, and integrate the
computational resources in a large heterogeneous system.

We base our description on several developments in system engineering of constructed complex systems: our
knowledge-based approach to intelligent integration infrastructure, called ``wrappings'', on the wrapping expression
notation {\em wrex} for communication among agents, on our Problem Posing Interpretation of programming
languages, and on the use of Virtual Worlds as a coordination environment.

The basic idea is to embody the processes as agents, the computational resources as tools, and the
meta-knowledge as guides to the tools.  The result is a computationally reflective multi-agent architecture that we
think is very interesting as an approach to constructing complex systems.

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