An agent may carry out an entire task itself, or it may coordinate with other agents that perform parts of the task. We will develop an architecture that integrates three key technologies for organizational design. The University of Delaware subcontract will be responsible for developing distributed coordination algorithms that adapt to changing situations and respond to intrusions by creating new computational organizations. Using these algorithms, agents accomplish a large number of interrelated tasks and schedule the order of those tasks to achieve goals for the quality of results and the time required to return those results. Because agents select among available methods, they can exploit variability, diversity, and redundancy in available methods.
Distributed coordination is difficult to disrupt and degrades gracefully as agents are compromised.
We will build on our previous work to produce coordination algorithms specifically for designed to enhance survivability. These algorithms will exploit knowledge about the system's goals and characteristics of the current agents, methods, and resources. We will extend this approach to begin to develop new classes of mechanisms specifically aimed at survivable systems. Some of these mechanisms will be general, but we also want the agents to be able to learn situation-specific coordination mechanisms. This task will primarily be carried out by the UD subcontractor.