A collaboration strategy for autonomous, highly specialized agents

The typical planning, design or operations problem has multiple objectives and constraints. Such problems can be solved using only autonomous agents, each specializing in a small and distinct subset of the overall objectives and constraints. No centralized control is necessary. Instead, agents collaborate by observing and modifying one another's work. Convergence to good solutions for a variety of real and academic problems has been obtained by embedding a few simple rules in each agent. The paper develops these rules and illustrates their use.