Sophisticated and distributed: The transportation domain

Summary form only given. The transportation domain is presented as a multiagent scenario, and the use of distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) techniques for solving cooperatively the hard problems that occur within this domain is demonstrated. The authors sketch the DAI techniques used in the MARS multiagent scenario. MARS implements a society of transportation companies whose goal it is to deliver a set of dynamically given orders satisfying given cost and/or time constraints. Three aspects are stressed: cooperation, task decomposition, and distributed scheduling. The MARS system has been implemented for a UNIX LAN environment using the multiagent development language MAGSY (K. Fisher, 1992). First results are encouraging. Six medium-sized companies run on six nodes of the network and plan a load of 400 transportation orders between about 50 German cities in about 20 minutes and yield good solutions without using a central scheduling algorithm.<
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