Agents and autonomous distributed systems

An Autonomous Distributed System (ADS) is a collection of autonomous entities, which realize a given function through mutual interactions. This concept of ADS allows the development of systems, which involves a large number of independent entities and dynamically changing structure to meet the evolving user requirements. Agents are characterised by the concepts of situatedness, flexibility and autonomy. A multi agent system is a group of interacting agents. In this paper, we explore the relevance of agent technology to the design and implementation of autonomous distributed systems.