Report on the 1984 Distributed

The fifth Distributed Artificial Intclligencc Workshop tias held at the Schlumberger-Doll Research Laboratory from October 14 to 17, 1984 It was attended by 20 participants from academic and industrial institutions. As in the past,' this workshop was designed as an informal meeting It included brief research rcport,s from individual groups along with genera1 discussion of questions of common interest. Distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) is concerned with cooperative solution of problems by a decentralized and loosely coupled collection of knowledge sources (KSs), each embodied in a distinct processor node. The KSs cooperate in the sense that no one of them has sufficient information to solve the entire problem; mutual sharing of information is necessary to allow the group as a whole to product an answer. By decentralized we mean that both control and data are logically and often geographically distributed; there is neither global control nor global data storage.