Archon provides a software framework that assists interaction between the subcomponents of a distributed AI application, and a design methodology that helps structure these interactions. The Archon project has been applied to several real world industrial applications. Two of these applications, electricity transportation management and particle accelerator control, have run online in the organizations for which they were developed-Iberdrola, a Spanish electric utility, and the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN). Archon's problem solving entities are called agents; they can control their own problem solving and interact with other community members. The interactions typically involve agents cooperating and communicating with one another to enhance their individual problem solving and to better solve the overall application problem. Each agent consists of an Archon layer and an application program (known as an intelligent system)