An architecture and protocol for communications satellite constellations regarded as multi-agent systems

This paper presents an architecture for satellites regarded as intercommunicating agents. The architecture is based upon a postmodern paradigm of artificial intelligence in which represented knowledge is regarded as text, inference procedures are regarded as social discourse and decision-making conventions, and the semantics of representations is grounded in the situated behaviour and activity of agents. A particular protocol is described for agent participation in distributed search and retrieval operations conducted as joint activities.