Interaction Protocols for a Network of Environmental Problem Solvers

Environmental management and emergency response often involves the joint cooperation of anetwork of distributed problem solvers, each of which may be specialised for a specific task or problem domain.Some of these problem solvers could be human, others could be ‘intelligent’ environmental monitoring andcontrol systems. Environmental software systems are needed not only for the provision of basic environmentalinformation but also to support the coordination of these problem solvers. An agent architecture can supportthe requirement associated with disparate problem solvers. The various stakeholders in the process arerepresented by software agents which can collaborate with each other toward achieving a particular goal. Thecommunication between agents can be accomplished by using interaction protocols which are represented bycoloured Petri nets (CPN). This paper describes an approach for providing this support by employing asoftware agent framework for the modelling and execution of environmental process tasks in a networkedenvironment.