Collaboration rules for autonomous software agents

摘要

Can autonomous software agents that are distributed over a computer network collaborate effectively? Both empirical evidence and theory suggest that they can. Moreover, there seem to be simple rules for designing problem-solving organizations in which collaboration among such agents is automatic and scale-effective (adding agents tends to improve solution-quality; adding computers tends to improve solution-speed). This paper develops some of these rules for off-line problems and argues that they can be extended for the on-line (real-time) control of power systems.