KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR PERFORMING DYNAMIC DISTRIBUTED PROBLEM SOLVING

Disclosed is an invention that provides a knowledge management system that supports inquiries of distributed knowledge resources. Those inquiries may be in the form of questions or problem statements presented by a user. Interaction between a user and the knowledge resources is mediated by a collection of cooperative intelligent agents. The cooperative intelligent agents incorporate generalized automated negotiation and distributed inference (i.e., problem-solving) processes. Using those processes in a hierarchical architecture, the invention analyzes input problem statements and organizes the problem statements as sets of tasks. In pursuit of each task, the invention solicits accessible knowledge repositories, represented by knowledge agents, for relevant knowledge, and then analyzes and integrates responses from those knowledge repositories. The invention may then provide the responses to a human user or a using process.