Development of distributed, intelligent information management systems

In this paper we present a distributed scalable, and agent-based architecture for information integration and management. In this architecture, legacy systems are wrapped as agents that act as service providers as well as service requestors. The agents are further organized into a task/information management network in order to exchange and share information. The information carried by all agents and the tasks that they can perform are then modeled by a domain model, which is developed with the aid of ontologies. Using the domain model and AI planning techniques, a complex task is decomposed into subtasks to be carried out by capable agents. We have used this agent-based architecture to develop an integrated information management system for routine ship maintenance tasks.