Abstract
Three classes of oceanographic addressing relevant distinct scientific and applied objectives in the Portuguese coastal waters are examined. Then, by assuming some mission organizations in the light of the current technological state-of-art, a set of functionalities required for an operational system are extracted. Finally, some requirements for the design and development of such a class of systems are discussed.

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Abstract

Abstract
Multi-agent architectures are well suited for complex inherently distributed problem solving domains. From the many challenging aspects that arise within this framework, a crucial one emerges: how to incorporate dynamic and conflicting agent beliefs? While the belief revision activity in a single agent scenario is concentrated on incorporating new information while preserving consistency, in a multi-agent system it also has to deal with possible conflicts between the agents perspectives. To provide an adequate framework, each agent, built as a combination of an assumption based belief revision system and a cooperation layer, was enriched with additional features: a distributed search control mechanism allowing dynamic context management, and a set of different distributed consistency methodologies. As a result, a Distributed Belief Revision Testbed (DiBeRT) was developed. This paper is a preliminary report presenting some of DiBeRT contributions: a concise representation of external beliefs; a simple and innovative methodology to achieve distributed context management; and a reduced inter-agent data exchange format. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1996.

Abstract

Abstract