AN INTELLIGENT AGENT COMMUNITY APPROACH TO KNOWLEDGE SHARING

This paper illustrates a community of intelligent agents and how they facilitate knowledge sharing in the process of environmental scanning. The main components of the distributive feature of the agent communit y are a manager that controls all processes at a node, a server to han dle the inter-node communication requests and services, a planner to p rovide an efficient plan of communication, and a scheduler to use the resources effectively. Methodologically, these are detailed from a sof tware engineering perspective as we present an example of the agent co mmunity in use: supporting a group working in disparate units of the o rganization. These units include new business acquisition at the strat egic level and new services to increase market share units at the tact ical level of the organization. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.