ARCHON^TM (ARchitecture for Cooperative Heterogeneous ON-line systems) is Europe's largest project in the area of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI). It has devised a general-purpose architecture, software framework and methodology which has been used to support the development of DAI systems in a number of industrial domains. Some examples of the applications to which it has been successfully applied include: electricity distribution and supply, electricity transmission and distribution, control of a cement kiln complex, control of a particle accelerator, and control of a robotics application. The type of cooperating community that it supports has a decentralised control regime and individual problem solving agents which are large grain, loosely coupled, and semi-autonomous. This paper tackles a broad range of issues related to the application of ARCHON technology to industrial applications. Firstly, it gives the rationale for a DAI approach to industrial applications and highl...

: Systems in which semi-autonomous problem solving agents communicate and cooperate with one another represent an exciting vision of future computing environments. However, if this vision is ever going to result in commercially viable systems then consideration must be given to the large software base which exists within many organisations. Success requires the ability to incorporate pre-existing systems alongside purpose built agents in a cooperating community. This requirement is vital because the former represent a substantial resource investment which companies cannot afford to consign to the scrap heap. This paper reports on our experiences of constructing cooperating communities which contain elements which were pre-existing and some which were developed specifically for incorporation into an integrated environment. The general purpose framework of ARCHON (ARchitecture for Cooperative Heterogeneous ON-line systems) provides the underlying technology which facilitates cooperative ...

The ARCHON Layer concepts described in this paper have been devised and implemented by