Distributed AI is the branch of AI concerned with how to coordinate behavior among a collection of semi-autonomous problem-solving agents: how they can coordinate their knowledge, goals and plans to act together, to solve joint problems, or to make individually or globally rational decisions in the face of uncertainty and multiple, conflicting perspectives. Distributed, coordinated systems of problem solvers are rapidly becoming practical partners in critical human problem-solving environments, and DAI is a rapidly developing field of both application and research, experiencing explosive...

This book is the first to directly address the question of how to bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of their differences in style,...