Formalizing Distributed Search in Cooperative Distributed Problem-Solving Systems

计算机网络的爆炸性增长创造了访问大量计算能力和信息的潜力，但是需要新的分布式计算模型来充分利用这些资源。协同分布式问题解决（CDPS）是指利用分布在网络计算机中的智能软件代理系统协同工作来解决大规模问题。CDPS方法可以产生高度灵活和可靠的系统，并可用于广泛的潜在应用。该项目的目标是通过提高对系统和领域特征如何相互作用以影响CDPS系统性能的理解，以及通过确定在特定条件下表现良好的CDPS策略，使构建用于实际应用的CDPS系统变得更容易。这将使CDPS技术得到比目前更广泛的应用。该项目将通过以下方式实现这一目标：开发将CDPS系统建模为分布式搜索过程的形式化方法；实施软件工具，使用这些模型来预测CDPS系统的性能；识别对预测CDPS性能至关重要的通用域特征；并进行广泛的实验，以建立一套有效的抽象CDPS策略。

The explosive growth of computer networks has created the potential to access a great deal of computing power and information, but new models of distributed computing are required to fully utilize these resources. Cooperative distributed problem solving (CDPS) is concerned with solving large-scale problems using systems of intelligent software agents, distributed among networked computers, working cooperatively. CDPS approaches can produce highly flexible and reliable systems, and can be used for a wide range of potential applications. The goal of this project is to make it easier to to build CDPS systems for real-world applications, by improving the understanding of how system and domain characteristics interact to affect the performance of CDPS systems, and by identifying CDPS strategies that perform well under particular conditions. This will allow CDPS techniques to be more widely applied than they currently are. The project will pursue this goal by: developing formalisms for modeling CDPS systems as distributed search processes; implementing software tools that use these models to predict the performance of CDPS systems; identifying generic domain characteristics that are critical for predicting CDPS performance; and performing a broad range of experiments to build up a suite of effective abstract CDPS strategies.