MULTIAGENT NETWORK FOR COOPERATIVE WORK

In the last decade, an important amount of work has been done on Group ware systems development. The networking improvements have heavily inf luenced corporate applications of information systems known as Intrane ts. The use of open system architectures and TCP/IP protocols within c orporate networks as well as the widespread use of database interfaces are changing the application perspective of groupware. Multi-agent Sy stems (MAS) have been proposed as a key technology to deal with many o f the problems arising from the new world-wide information infrastruct ure. We are interested in applying MAS technology to the intranet worl d, to create an infrastructure of multi-agents to support the cooperat ive work within the organization. We present the RESCH project, which consists of a multi-agent system to support cooperative work among the persons in a company. The two main results described in the paper are : (1) a multi-agent system allowing the connection and cooperation amo ng a set of existing expert systems; (2) a multi-agent system supporti ng the cooperative work for organization of meetings in a company. The planning mechanism used in this multi-agent applications is based on the Augmented Transition Network formalism. We present it through the classical example of the Contract Net Protocol. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.