Combining amorphous computing and reactive agent-based systems: a paradigm for pervasive intelligence?

• Authors: David Servat;Alexis Drogoul
• Venue: Proceedings of the first international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems: part 1
• Year: 2002

This paper is intended to provide insight on the upheaval that the advent of computing systems based on pervasive computing will represent. We show, after an introduction to this concept, why the traditional rules of design, validation, control and deployment nowadays used in the industry are not adapted anymore to these new systems. We then show that the multi-agent systems domain seems, in a number of ways, to be able to answer some of the problems they raise. But we also claim that designing these "new" MAS will certainly require us to consider alternative sources of inspiration, other than economy or sociology. One promising direction, which we call Pervasive Intelligence, PI, is to view and design them as "ecosystems of physical agents" (heterogeneous, open, dynamic, and massive group of interacting agents), organized after "biological", "physical" or "chemical" principles. Two domains of research illustrate this direction: reactive multi-agent systems and amorphous computing. The first one studies complex, self-organized, situated systems that rely on biological metaphors of communication and organization. The second one, which draws its inspiration from chemistry, tries to develop engineering principles to obtain coherent behavior from the cooperation of large numbers of unreliable computing parts connected in irregular and time-varying ways. We think that a convergence between the researches conducted in these two domains would pave the way towards suitable paradigms and methodologies to tackle the challenge that Pervasive Intelligence represents for the next decade.