Distributed AI is where several agents (robots or software), each with AI capability interact with one another communicating and/or acting in a shared environment. This may involve collaboratively solving a problem such as factory robots reconfiguring to deal with changing orders or faults. Alternatively may be a looser form of interaction such as multiple autonomous vehicles in a busy urban environment. Note the term is not usually applied when a single AI algorithm is employs parallel processing, not for ensemble methods or swarm computing employing vast numbers of simple agents.
Defined on page 373
Used on pages 225, 373