ARCHON: a distributed artificial intelligence system for industrial application

Abstract

ARCHON™ (ARchitecture for Cooperative Heterogeneous ON-line systems) is Europe’s largest project in the area of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI). It has devised a general-purpose architecture, software framework and methodology which has been used to support the development of DAI systems in a number of industrial domains. Some examples of the applications to which it has been successfully applied include: electricity distribution and supply, electricity transmission and distribution, control of a cement kiln complex, control of a particle accelerator, and control of a robotics application. The type of cooperating community that it supports has a decentralised control regime and individual problem solving agents which are large grain, loosely coupled, and semi-autonomous.