Historical milestone · 1980
Contract Net Protocol
Reviewed through September 18, 2026
1980 · Historical milestone
Contract Net Protocol
- Era
- 1980s
- Theme
- Multi-agent coordination
- Evidence form
- Distributed nodes announced tasks, submitted bids, awarded contracts, and reported results
- School / paradigm
- Distributed AI / organizational metaphor
- Institution / context
- Stanford / Lockheed
- Researchers
- Reid G. Smith
Researcher index
Reid G. Smith
Distributed AI · Stanford / Lockheed
Contract Net Protocol
Why it still matters. Formalized dynamic task announcement, bidding, award, and reporting.
Representative source for this researcher — not necessarily the source of this milestone: https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.1980.1675516 (opens in a new tab)
Understand
Plain-language record, transferred from the reviewed source module.
Theory or experimental setup. Provided a general protocol for dynamic task allocation without a single detailed global plan.
Result / historical claim. Communication, bidding, and subtask decomposition can dominate performance; local bids may miss global optima.
Apply
Professional implication, only where the reviewed record states one.
The checked-in record does not state a separate professional application for this entry. The topic page places it in the wider research lineage: .
Verify
Evidence status, stated limitations, and the external sources this record actually carries.
Evidence form. Distributed nodes announced tasks, submitted bids, awarded contracts, and reported results
Limitation / debate. Agent delegation, tool routing, market-style orchestration, and explicit task contracts.
Source status. This milestone row does not carry a primary-source URL in the approved export, and we do not have a verified link for it in our own research. We do not guess one.
No primary-source URL is recorded for this entry in our reviewed data. Rather than manufacture a citation, we link the Implement Agentic research page that carries the record.
Reproduce
A reproduction tutorial is linked only when one exists for this exact record.
A reproduction tutorial is not yet available for this entry. The closest reviewed material is .
Cite or share
APA-like: This historical record carries a year only, and no author or publisher of record in the checked-in data. An APA reference would have to invent that metadata.
BibTeX: BibTeX requires an author and publication venue. Historical lineage entries store a narrative record and its source link, not structured authorship, so the field would be fabricated.