CODA: a collaboration oriented data agent

This paper provides an analysis of combining data management and agent technologies, proposes a data agent paradigm aiming at distributed multi-agent collaborative computation environments - collaboration oriented data agent (CODA), and discusses the selected design solution and implementation technologies. CODA is designated with three main features - XML-based structured data infrastructure, central service and distributed data management, and event-condition-action rules-based reactive transaction mode, all of them are arguably bringing out the best in each other, which has been shown in a prototype and a multidisciplinary design optimization-oriented case study.