Flavors Technology Incorporated

Slide 6 of 24

From their inception the PIM, Paracell, and the Paracell Navigator were designed to support agent-based approaches to solutions. The agent approach tends to be more easily developed, and is more robust than traditional serial approaches.

Sequential processing and serial approaches to programming tend to result in a programming "house of cards" in which one event is dependent upon an earlier event in a sequence. Code must be developed that provides the "glue" between all of these various processes. As a result, making changes that effect only part of an application can become difficult, and can cause undesirable results other places in the code.

In an agent-based approach, code is developed for each agent. Agents are independent, and are concerned with only their own functionality. Agents interact through a common environment or view of the world, such as through shared memory. In this architecture, agents can be added, removed, replicated or changed more easily. The interconnection between processes is a given provided by the architecture.

In general, agent-based systems result in applications developed with significantly less code. These applications can be developed more quickly, and are more robust and amenable to modification or enhancement once deployed.