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Self-Adaptive Software Project |
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Project Overview
While computer hardware has changed drastically in the past few years, computer software has struggled to keep pace. The centralized, monolithic programming model that was adequate, when treating computers as isolated entities, is poorly suited to distributed, multi-task-oriented computing. For computing to become truly ubiquitous, new distributed, multi-task-oriented programming methodologies must be developed. We believe that distributed, multi-agent technologies offer the capabilities needed. With these notions in mind, the Self Adaptive Software Project is developing a distributed Port-Based Adaptable Agent Architecture (PB3A) to explore this non-monolithic programming model.In the monolithic programming model, increasingly capable systems require increasingly complex software. Multi-agent systems achieve sophisticated capability through complex interactions, not increasingly complex software. As such, modularity, reconfigurability, and extensibility are most easily achievable and components can largely be tested in isolation. However, most implementations of multi-agent systems to not take advantage of modularity and reconfigurability because the depend too heavily on the foresight of the designer at design time. Reconfiguration is typically a time-consuming manual process that often involves changes to the components themselves. The creation of a general multi-agent software architecture that can learn from its own interaction with the world, evaluate its performance, and fine-tune itself to better achieve its goals would find inherent use in the distributed system, real-time control, and proxy computing arenas. We propose the distributed system supporting port-based agents to be such an architecture.
We are using mobile robots as a test bed, and we have integrated our work with the CyberRAVE environment.
If you are interested in using our architecture, please read our Tutorials page.