Date of Award

3-2000

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Scott A. DeLoach, PhD

Abstract

AgentTool is an AFIT-produced, AFOSR-sponsored multi-agent system (MAS) development tool intended for production of MASs that meet military requirements. This research focuses on enabling MAS design and synthesis tools like agentTool to store, retrieve, and filter persistent, reusable, and reliable agent domain knowledge. This "enabling" is vital if such tools are expected to produce consistent, maintainable, and verifiable agent applications on short timetables. Enabling requires: 1) modeling the agent knowledge domain, 2) designing and employing a persistent knowledge base, and 3) bridging that domain model to the knowledge base with an extensible domain interchange grammar. The achieved interchange grammar, called Multi-Agent Markup Language (MAML), is presented and shown to be capable of representing MAS design knowledge in a concise and easily parsed form that is readily stored and retrieved in the knowledge base. The selected knowledge base, called the Agent Random-Access Meta- Structure (ARAMS), is shown to support MAML and operate in a distributed environment that permits sharing of agent development knowledge between various tools and tool instances. Tests of MAML and ARAMS with agentTool are summarized, and related future work suggested.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-GCS-ENG-00M-21

DTIC Accession Number

ADA380744

Comments

The author's Vita page is omitted.

Download

Share

COinS