A TEMPORAL BLACKBOARD FOR A MULTIAGENT ENVIRONMENT

The multi-agent system paradigm emerges as an interesting approach in the Knowledge Based System (KBS) field, when distributed problem-solvi ng techniques are required for solving problems that can be represente d as a collection of groups of cooperating intelligent individuals. A key concept in the multi-agent systems is the interaction between agen ts. On the other hand time plays a crucial role in a wide range of KBS applications. Temporal reasoning and representations consists of form alizing the notion of time and providing means to represent and reason about the temporal aspects of knowledge. This paper presents a framew ork for agent communication based on the blackboard paradigm which is able to manage temporal information, and it provides its multiple acce ss and coherence management protocols.