Agent-based information fusion

A search on Google for the keywords " intelligent agents' will return more than 330,000 hits; " multi-agent " returns almost double that amount as well as over 5,000 citations on www.citeseer.com. What is agent technology and what has led to its enormous popularity in both the academic and commercial worlds? Agent-based system technology offers a new paradigm for designing and implementing software systems. The objective of this tutorial is to provide an overview of agents, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, covering such areas as: 1. what an agent is, its origins and what it does, 2. how intelligence is defined for and differentiates an intelligent agent from an agent, 3. how multi-agent systems coordinate agents with competing goals to achieve a meaningful result, and 4. how an agent differs from an object of a class or an expert system. Examples are presented of academic and commercial applications that employ agent technology. The potential pitfalls of agent development and agent usage are discussed.

2008

A search on Google for the keywords “intelligent agents ” will return more than 330,000 hits; “multi-agent ” returns almost double that amount. Over 5,000 citations appear on www.citeseer.com. What is agent technology and what has led to its enormous popularity in both the academic and commercial worlds? Agent-based system technology offers a new paradigm for designing and implementing software systems. The objective of this tutorial is to provide an overview of agents, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, covering such areas as: 1. what an agent is, its origins and what it does, 2. how intelligence is defined for and differentiates an intelligent agent from an agent, 3. how multi-agent systems coordinate agents with competing goals to achieve a meaningful result, and 4. how an agent differs from an object of a class or an expert system. Examples are presented of academic and commercial applications that employ agent technology. The potential pitfalls of agent development and...

Knowledge Engineering Review, 1995

The concept of an agent has become important in both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mainstream computer science. Our aim in this paper is to point the reader at what we perceive to be the most important theoretical and practical issues associated with the design and construction of intelligent agents. For convenience, we divide these issues into three areas (though as the reader will see, the divisions are at times somewhat arbitrary). Agent theory is concerned with the question of what an agent is, and the use of mathematical formalisms for representing and reasoning about the properties of agents. Agent architectures can be thought of as software engineering models of agents; researchers in this area are primarily concerned with the problem of designing software or hardware systems that will satisfy the properties specified by agent theorists. Finally, agent languages are software systems for programming and experimenting with agents; these languages may embody principles proposed by theorists. The paper is not intended to serve as a tutorial introduction to all the issues mentioned; we hope instead simply to identify the most important issues, and point to work that elaborates on them. The article includes a short review of current and potential applications of agent technology.

2008

Draft 14 October 2002 Do not quote or distribute Unmanned Autonomous Systems Unmanned Autonomous Systems (UAS) will be an increasingly important part of future military programs. Benefits of such systems include reduced manning, fewer casualties, the possibility of independent (split) operations, and the ability to deal more adequately with certain types of complex threats. Currently, there are over 45 UAV's and UCAV's, over 30 UUV's, more than 10 UGV's, and more than 10 USV's in various phases of testing and development, 2 besides a variety of unmanned space platforms. While a greater degree of standardization and modularity is foreseen in the future, hard requirements for different physical configurations and capabilities as well as the continued evolution of technology mean that multiple hardware platforms in each family of vehicles will continue to be a necessity. Agent technology can provide help in dealing with this heterogeneity by implementing capabilities-based modeling, management, lookup, and engagement of autonomous systems. Using sophisticated agent-based matchmaking and teamwork-based coordination approaches, these diverse platforms can be managed as a system of collaborating systems with common high-level interfaces and communicating in human-intelligible dialogues rather than as independent entities with diverse low-level API's and incomprehensible system messages. Agent technology can be of assistance in many areas of automation, including providing automated launch and recovery, automated sustainment, and especially a means of common control across diverse platforms and capabilities. While some efforts toward commonality within platform types are underway (e.g., Navy Tactical Control System (TCS) for UAV's, Army Joint Architecture for Unmanned Ground Systems (JAUGS)), there is a need for an unmanned system-common control architecture across all vehicle types. In such an architecture, high-level requests from a single warfighter user could simultaneously task and control multiple heterogeneous vehicles, and each vehicle could provide services and data products in an integrated fashion. Such an architecture would go beyond current prototypes that attempt to control autonomous vehicles as a relatively simple "swarm" to allow for rapid sophisticated configuration and delivery of effects based on operator intention, across the equivalent of a battle group package. Going beyond mere coordination of flight and simple task execution, agents operating on-board or off-board can assist controllers in directing the high-level behavior of a diverse set of vehicles that are capable of effecting many error recovery procedures autonomously. An additional role of agents is in increasing the span of human attention by providing assistance in monitoring and detection. Like air traffic controllers Part 1: Overview and Introduction 10 Draft 14 October 2002 Do not quote or distribute Advanced Command Posts Currently, the configuration of C4I systems and command centers is largely determined in advance of conflict. This means that processes (which may turn out to be faulty) are unwittingly embedded into the software and enforce rote procedures. This is fine until the military imperative demands flexibility or until strategies, tactics, or processes change. However, this difficulty is compounded by the fact that most of battle management is event-driven and not process-driven-a fact not acknowledged in most requirements-capture exercises. What is really required is a set of tools and mechanisms to enable Command Post reconfiguration on-the-fly, so that warfighters can respond to dynamic military imperatives in the battlespace. Also, increasingly, terms such as 'distributed cognition' (Hollan, Hutchins and Kirsch 2000) or augmented cognition' 3 are being used for the way humans off-load cognitive tasks into the information and physical domain. Clearly, C4I systems currently increase cognitive load and make things worse. Instead, they need to be designed in a different way so that they are malleable and are receptive to the tasks we give them. So, in future Command Posts, humans will not be deluged with information, because they will be able to shape the behavior of the command center and C4I systems to their will. They will be able to drive the enterprise-i.e., be active decisionmakers, not dumb process followers-such that the C4I tools and infrastructures fit their behavior to the human decision-making requirements and imperatives, not the other way round. Multi-agent systems, therefore, aim to address three facets of the command and control problem. First, there is the problem of delegation and execution of directives down from higher levels of command. Agent technology aims to enable a higher degree of autonomy and flexibility than has been possible with rigid command systems of the past. The claim is that on-board automated planning and inference capabilities in such agents would allow them to cope more adequately with situations involving significant uncertainties and unforeseen contingencies. Second, there is the corresponding problem of information flow, as data and analytic results mov upwards from levels of sensing and observing to inform the actions of commanders at different levels. It has been proposed that agent technology assist in providing secure intelligent filtering, data mining, abstraction, and routing of information to those who need to know. Finally, there are the problems of collaboration among diverse command and control operatives. Multi-agent systems typically incorporate some kind of theory of coordination and teamwork that aims to provide a greater degree of robustness to the complexities of interorganizational interaction. Agent technology has enabled the size of the deployed command post to be reduced and has streamlined command post operations by allowing the

2010

Military decision making demands an increasing ability to comprehend and structure the critical information on the battlefield. As the military evolves into a networked force, strain is placed on headquarters and others to collect and utilize information from across the battlefield in a timely and efficient manner. Human capability in analyzing all the data is not sufficient because the modern battlefield is characterized by dramatic movements, unexpected evolutions, chaotic behavior and non-linearities. It results a great need of powerful AI assistance in military decisions.

One agent in computer science is software or other computational type entity with some intelligence characteristics. Therefore, an intelligent agent is a composition of hardware, software with some intelligent features. Each intelligent agent perceives its environment with collecting some information about that environment through its sensors attempt to achieve its goals by acting through its actuators. Intelligent agents are having some internal characteristics (such as: autonomy, Learning/ reasoning, reactivity and goal oriented) and some external characteristics (such as: communication, cooperation, mobility). In this paper, we attempt to provide a comprehensive survey about history of intelligent agents’ evolution, various types of intelligent agents which are proposed, different applications of intelligent agents and some discussion about creating favorite intelligent agent.

1998

this articleis to help the reader to understand why agent technology is seen as a fundamentallyimportant new tool for building such a wide array of systems. Moreprecisely, our aims are five-fold:

The Knowledge Engineering Review, 1998

As the number of deployed multi-agent applications increases, further and better experience with the technology is gained, enabling a strong evaluation of the field from a more practical perspective. In particular, questions relating to how the theory of multi-agent systems impacts on practice, and how the practical development itself compares with other technologies, can be answered in the light of a heightened level of maturity. Given the tensions between theoreticians and practitioners in computing in general, let alone their spats in AI or multi-agent systems in particular, the discussion on agent systems and applications was both vigorous and enthusiastic