Tool agents in coordinated information systems

Abstract

We present a general agent-based architecture for coordinating the operation of autonomous tools based on a two-level repository scheme. Our architecture comprises two forms of agents — coordination agents which are responsible for the coordination activity and tool agents which are responsible for monitoring and controlling tool operations. The agents cooperate to ensure the overall consistency of information. In particular, we focus here on the tool agents and describe in detail the design and development of agents which enable existing tools to be integrated into such a coordination system. We present a general tool agent architecture and tool classification scheme. To demonstrate the issues and approaches, we describe two specific tool agents in some detail — one for a revision control system and one for a CAD system.