A Knowledge-Level Model of Co-ordination

Co-ordination is one of the central research issues in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Most of the efforts in designing co-ordination mechanisms set out from an agent-centred point of view: they see the individual actor with its local beliefs and reasoning capabilities as the foundation of all system properties. Our thesis is that co-ordination is best modelled from an environment-centred, social perspective, that considers the whole, situated system as the starting point of any analysis. We argue that this stance is reflected in Clancey’s modification of the Knowledgelevel hypothesis. On the basis of this modified hypothesis we introduce a distinction between co-ordination at the Knowledgeand at the Symbollevel. Finally, we present a Knowledge-level model of co-ordination and illustrate it by specifying the co-ordination processes of an intelligent traffic management system.