ICDM: Integrated Cooperative Decision Making-In Practice

Multi-agent systems provide an attractive architecture for the implementation of complex systems. Much of the research is focussed on complete automation of the decision making process as a means of duplicating human abilities f o r working with new problems and environments. There as also a need for systems that employ the human as an agent and rely on human abilities for common sense and deep thought. The CAD Research Center a t Cal Poly and CDM Technologies have significant experience in building systems of the latter t ype that assist human users in solvang complex problems in planning, design and economacs. This experience has generated a set of guidelines and a software development framework that have collectively been identified as ICDM. This paper presents a brief history of major applications built with the ICDM framework, and proposes some basic precepts.