The goal of this research project, a collaborative award with IIS-9812764, is to create and disseminate a software infrastructure for building complex and large-scale information systems that are both distributed and robust. The path to such systems lies in viewing distributed information systems as multi-agent systems: computational organizations consisting of potentially hundreds of intelligent real-time agents. Robust information systems will adapt both their functions and performance in response to changes in system goals, changes in performance requirements, and changes in the available software and hardware resources. A multi-agent architecture appropriate for such systems is being developed that contains component technologies for local agent scheduling, multi-agent coordination, organizational design, detection and diagnosis of inappropriate behavior in face of environmental change, and on-line learning to improve the performance of the other components. To evaluate this research, a multi-agent simulation testbed is being utilized to conduct extensive evaluation of the individual technologies, an integrated system prototype, and the issues of scalability to large agent societies. The impact of this work is to provide software, techniques and empirical studies that will facilitate the construction of the next generation of robust information systems. http://dis.cs.umass.edu/
