An Agent Based Solution for Dispatching Items in a Distributed Environment

environment. Herald is suitable for scenarios where the process could be modeled as a tree: starting from the root node the collection of items is distributed along the nodes where they can be processed, forwarded to other nodes, and duplicated if necessary. Herald assigns a specific software agent to each node of the tree which participates into the dispatching process according to the knowledge base of the multi-agent system. Herald works as a general infrastructure for simulating, testing and executing dispatching algorithms that can be easily integrated into the system by changing the decision making process of the agents composing the architecture. A prototypal implementation, based on the AgentService programming framework, is then presented as a proof of its applicability in industrial scenarios.