Distributed Coordination in Unstructured Intelligent Agent Societies

This research work aims at developing an innovative process for distributed agent coordination in totally unstructured peer-to-peer networks. In this proposal, an agent that receives a request will use an AI‑based planning algorithm to contribute to the received request by handling the parts for which it has know-how and available resources; and it will use peer-to-peer computing algorithms to delegate the partially-solved problem to other agents that can possibly handle it. These, in turn, will recursively apply the same process until the initial request is completely solved or until some specified termination condition holds.

The thesis contributions to the state-of-the-art are:

• the creation of an AI-based planning algorithm capable of planning with only partial knowledge of available planning operators;
• the creation of a coordination infrastructure that enables agents to delegate partially-solved problems to other agents in totally unstructured peer-to-peer networks;

Ph.D. Thesis Advisor: Professor Luís Miguel Botelho

Conclusion: 1st Trimester of 2010 (hopefully)