Beyond Distributed Artificial Intelligence

Excerpt

Multi-Agent Systems is one of the most fascinating research areas in? With my Artificial Intelligence background, I am tempted to finish that sentence with Artificial Intelligence. Others would finish with “computer science”, “economics”,… Maybe this view is not fully up to date anymore? Started as Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) in the 80s, Multi-Agent Systems as a research area has rapidly increased from the sub-area of DAI that deals with non-cooperative agents to a research field related to the theory and application of systems of interacting somehow autonomous actors. Interaction is the key. There are so many systems, in which the level of interaction that is addressed by Multi-Agent System approaches is the appropriate one for designing or analyzing them. Human–robot teams, massively open distributed systems based on internet, modern transportation or location-based systems, future energy systems, modern computer games… are just a few of the areas in which the usage of Multi-Agent Systems is based on or better said, contains interacting naturally or artificially intelligent systems. Maybe Multi-Agent Systems should be seen as an umbrella with AI as one of its sub-fields (beyond the view that S. Russell and P. Norvig built their AI books on)? I am not sure; the thing that I’m very sure about is that for me Multi-Agent Systems and Artificial Intelligence cannot be separated. Nobody uses the term Distributed AI any more. Yet, “All real systems are distributed.” (F. Hayes-Roth 1980). So, why? …