An intelligent agent community approach to knowledge sharing

This paper illustrates a community of intelligent agents and how they facilitate knowledge sharing in the process of environmental scanning. The main components of the distributive feature of the agent community are a manager that controls all processes at a node, a server to handle the inter-node communication requests and services, a planner to provide an efficient plan of communication, and a scheduler to use the resources effectively. Methodologically, these are detailed from a software engineering perspective as we present an example of the agent community in use: supporting a group working in disparate units of the organization. These units include new business acquisition at the strategic level and new services to increase market share units at the tactical level of the organization. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.