Increasing coherence in a distributed problem-solving network

  • Authors:

  • Edmund H. Durfee;Victor R. Lesser;Daniel D. Corkill

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts;Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts;Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'85 Proceedings of the 9th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 1985

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Abstract

Globally coherent behavior is the holy grail of distributed problem solving network research. Obtaining coherent network activity without sacrificing node autonomy and network flexibility places severe demands on the local control component of each node. We introduce new mechanisms that allow a node to compute an abstracted, high-level description of its local state which it then uses to formulate multi-step plans. Not only do these mechanisms significantly improve local problem solving performance, but they also enable nodes to make dynamic refinements to their long-term network organisation knowledge. The coordination decisions made by nodes are thus increasingly responsive to changes in network activity as problem solving progresses. We provide experimental results indicating that these new mechanisms improve the internal control decisions of a node, reduce the communication requirements of the network, and improve network coherence. We believe that these mechanisms would also be useful for control in centralised multi-level blackboard-based problem solving systems.