Software Agents in the IMPACT System

The IMPACT (Interactive Maryland Platform for Agents Collaborating Together) is an ongoing joint project (with Univ. Maryland and others) to provide a system for creating and deploying software agents, which control local data and knowledge bases. The agents may communicate, and collaborate to solve complex tasks. Software agent architectures are emerging as a design paradigm for distributed hetereogeneous data access.

Practical applications of IMPACT include e.g. supply chain management, the aircraft control flight into terrain (CFIT) problem (Lockheed, Boeing), and department store applications.

The system is based on the following design principles and components:

• incorporation of legacy code and data
• service description language (SDL) for agent services
• matchmaking for best-fitting services
• IMPACT Servers for yellow pages services
• intelligent agent decision making
• secure reasoning
• temporal reasoning
• uncertain reasoning
• meta-reasoning and belief

See also: IMPACT homepage

Selected Publications

• T. Eiter and V.S. Subrahmanian. Deontic Action Programs. In K.-D. Schewe, T. Ripke and T. Polle, editors, Fundamentals of Information Systems: Selected Papers presented at the 7th International Workshop on Foundations of Models and Languages for Data and Objects (FoMLaDO 98), October 5--8, 1998, Timmel, Germany, pages 37--54. Kluwer, 1999.

• K. Arisha, T. Eiter, S. Kraus, F. Ozcan, R. Ross, and V.S. Subrahmanian. IMPACT: A Platform for Collaborating Agents. IEEE Intelligent Systems , 14(2):64--72, March/April 1999.

• T. Eiter, V.S. Subrahmanian, and G. Pick. Heterogeneous Active Agents, I: Semantics. Artificial Intelligence, 108(1-2):179-255, 1999.

• T. Eiter, V.S. Subrahmanian, and G. Pick. Heterogeneous Active Agents, II: Algorithms and Complexity. Artificial Intelligence, 108(1-2):257-307, 1999.

• T. Eiter, V.S. Subrahmanian, and T.J. Rogers. Heterogeneous Active Agents, III: Polynomially Implementable Agents. Artificial Intelligence, 117(1):107--167, 2000.

• V.S. Subrahmanian, P. Bonatti, J. Dix, T. Eiter, S. Kraus, F. Ozcan, and R. Ross. Heterogeneous Agent Systems . MIT Press, June 2000, ISBN 0-262-19436-8, 640 pp., 65 illus.