DARPA Autonomous Negotiating Teams PI Meeting May 9-11, 2000 Doubletree Guest Suites Seattle, WA

Introduction Agenda

The goal of DARPA's Autonomous Negotiating Teams (ANT) program is to create technology for the autonomous negotiation of assignment and customization of resources, such as weapons, to tasks, such as moving targets. The technology will enable designers to build resource management systems that operate in highly decentralized environments, making maximum use of local information, providing solutions that are both good enough, and soon enough. These systems will have components that communicate effectively with local peers, and also with information and command concentrators at higher levels of situation abstraction. ANT systems will scale to much larger problem sizes by making maximum use of localized, rather than global information, and by explicitly making decision theoretic trade-offs. Distinguishing characteristics of ANT negotiations is the explicit time- bounds on calculation of actions. This new technology will enable us to build systems that are designed to utilize, at the application level, all the distributed, networked computational resources (hardware, operating systems, and communication) that have been developed over the past two decades.

Direct comments concerning this meeting to: John Luca