Peer-to-peer coupled agent systems for distributed situation management

Large scale situation management applications such as disaster recovery and network-centric battle management are characterized by distributed heterogeneous agent platforms with dynamic agent populations, highly variable network connectivity and bandwidth, and localized situation knowledge and event collection. We describe a new agent model and an integrated peer-to-peer architecture which addresses these requirements. We present an extension of the BDI agent model which allows it to be used in highly reactive applications. We describe the use of multi-hop peer-to-peer overlays which provides highly scalable coupling of distributed agent platforms. Finally, we describe a two-phase semantic discovery mechanism which serves as a basis for agents to share events and situations across the overlay.