Distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) was a subfield of Artificial Intelligent research with the goal ofdeveloping distributed solutions for complex problems. Nowadays, DAI has been largely supplanted by the field of multi-agent systems.

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed by multiple interacting intelligent agents usually used to solve problems difficult/impossible to manage and resolve by a centralized, monolithic solution. The approach is applied in agent-oriented software engineeringsolutions, in cooperative and coordinative systems, negotiation and problem solving.