Agents for distributed decision-making

Agents are modules from which problem solving can be built. Structurally, an agent is a bundle of sensors, decision-makers and actuators; behaviorally, an agent is a mapping from an in-space (all the things the agent can sense) to an out-space (all things the agent can affect). Agents can be simple or compound. More specifically, lesser agents can be organized into greater or super-agents. An agent in an organization is autonomous to the extent that it is unsupervised. In this paper the benefits of an autonomous agent is discussed. However, there is a downside to autonomy: the work of completely autonomous agents cannot be externally coordinated. Unless such agents are self-coordinating, they will tend to work at cross-purposes, creating pandemonium rather than progress. The mechanism for self-coordination of an autonomous agent is presented in this paper.