Hardware Agents: A New Approach to Support Development and Management of Information Systems

摘要

The multi agent paradigm that is so prevalent in distributed software systems can be extended to information management and monitoring systems that incorporate significant amounts of reconfigurable hardware. Such systems have the capability of performing intelligent operations much faster than traditional software only implementations. The incorporation of hardware agents makes it possible to better utilize system resources and develop a unified system model that spans the hardware/software continuum. This paper introduces the basic hardware agent concept, and illustrates how it can be applied to improve the flexibility and performance of real-time sensor/data fusion operations.