Distributed automated reasoning: issues in coordination, cooperation, and performance

The authors present a distributed automated reasoning system (DARES) that can perform automated reasoning in, and about, a distributed domain. The technique developed for performing automated reasoning is discussed, with emphasis on issues dealing with task coordination and agent cooperation. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the performance of the system, and its ability to perform distributed automated reasoning. The experimental results demonstrate that agents in a loosely coupled network of problem solvers can work semi-independently, yet focus their attention with the aid of relatively simple heuristics when cooperation is appropriate