DIAL: A Distributed Intelligent Agent Laboratory

这项工作的重点是研究人工智能系统之间的协调。一个目标是采用为协调的不同方面开发的技术，并将它们统一在一个单一的计算理论中。最初，这项工作将发展一种形式主义和计算理论，通过将计划、组织设计和调度的不同方法结合在一起，可以导致新的协调技术。该理论为提高性能、减少开销、提高可靠性和灵活管理人工智能系统之间的分布式资源提供了一个强大的框架。这项工作将为开发人工智能系统提供一个通用的协调框架，因为我们相信，与他人互动的推理是智能的基础。DIAL的第二个目标是建立一个验证协调理论和发现新理论的实验基础设施。为了便于对DIAL内部和其他地方的不同理论进行比较，将开发一个通用的便携式模拟试验台。技术也将集成到实际的移动机器人中，以研究实时物理系统中感知、行动、推理和通信之间的相互作用。这项研究将有助于为将智能、协作的机器人引入现实环境铺平道路。

This work focuses on the study of coordination between AI systems. One objective is to take techniques developed for different aspects of coordination and unify them in a single computational theory. Initially, the work will develop a formalism and computational theory that can lead to novel coordination techniques by drawing together the separate approaches of planning, organizational design, and scheduling. This theory provides a powerful framework for improving performance, reducing overhead, increasing reliability, and flexibly managing distributed resources among AI systems. The work will lead toward a generic coordination framework for developing AI systems, because we believe that reasoning about interactions with others is fundamental to intelligence. A second objective of DIAL is to build an experimental infrastructure for validating coordination theories and discovering new theories. To facilitate comparisons between alternative theories both within DIAL and elsewhere, a versatile, portable simulation testbed will be developed. Techniques will also be integrated into actual mobile robots to investigate the interplay between sensing, acting, reasoning, and communicating in real-time physical systems. The research will help pave the way for introducing intelligent, cooperating robots into real- world environments.