Distributed Information Retrieval and Integration through a Centralized Agent-Base System

Soundar Kumara, Nina Berry, Goutam Satapathy, Octavia Camps, Brian Sheldon and Tim Thomas Intelligent Design and Diagnostics Research Lab Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering 207 Hammond Building The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802 (kumara, goutam, or berry @marie.iddr.ie.psu.edu) Rapid changes have taken place in our world over the past few years. Information technology is revolutionizing the way we live. Knowledge is power and the ease of access to this knowledge makes the manipulation of the data critical. Yet, if one can harness the vast integration of data which flavors the users’ knowledge the end result could somehow satisfy the elusive quest for complete knowledge integration. This paper overviews the Distributed Intelligent Architecture for Logistics (DIAL) system, currently being developed as a project for the U.S. Army Logistics Evaluation Agency. The DIAL system is designed to integrate existing software packages into an unified architecture to support the needs of the end users. To ascertain what integration is needed in the DIAL system three major questions were addressed (1) what task(s) will the users be facing, what data will be needed by the user, and (3) how to integrate across a distributed platform of resources. The solution to these questions resides in the design and development of the centralized agent-based architecture DIAL, where the software applications, data, and users are all treated as software agent components residing in distributed computer systems.