On incorporating multi-agents in combined hardware/software based reconfigurable systems - a general architectural framework

This paper introduces a general framework to allow the concepts of multi-agent technology to be extended to support reconfigurable systems -systems in which the functionality of both the associated hardware and software can be altered dynamically or statically with time. The utilization of such a paradigm has the potential to greatly increase the flexibility, efficiency, expandability, and maintainability of such systems and to provide an attractive alternative to the current set of disjoint approaches that are currently applied to this problem domain. The focus of the work described in this paper is to address how unified multi-agent architectures can be created and applied to the reconfigurable hardware domain.