Intelligent agent concepts in the modern library

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1999

The leading edge of computer science research is notoriously fickle. New trends come and go with alarming and unfailing regularity. In such a rapidly changing field, the fact that research interest in a subject lasts more than a year is worthy of note. The fact that, after five years, interest not only remains, but actually continues to grow is highly unusual. As 1998 marked the fifth birthday of the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), it seemed appropriate for the organizers of the original workshop to comment on this remarkable growth, and reflect on how the field has developed and matured. The first ATAL workshop was co-located with the Eleventh European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-94), which was held in Amsterdam. The fact that we chose an AI conference to co-locate with is telling: at that time, we expected most researchers with an interest in agents to come from the AI community. The workshop, which was planned over the summer of 1993, attracted 32 submissions, and was attended by 55 people. ATAL was the largest workshop at ECAI-94, and the clear enthusiasm on behalf of the community made the decision to hold another ATAL workshop simple. The ATAL-94 proceedings were formally published in January 1995 under the title Intelligent Agents, and included an extensive review article, a glossary, a list of key agent systems, and-unusually for the proceedings of an academic workshop-a full subject index. The high scientific and production values embodied by the ATAL-94 proceedings appear to have been recognized by the community, and resulted in ATAL proceedings being the most successful sequence of books published in Springer-Verlag's Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series. ATAL-95 was held at the International Joint Conference on AI, which in 1995 was held in Montreal, Canada. The number of submissions leapt to 55, and the workshop was attended by 70 people. Since many international conferences fail to attract this many submissions and delegates, it was decided at this point to make ATAL an annual event. It was also decided to hold ATAL-96 in Europe, following the successful model of ATAL-94 by co-locating with ECAI-96, which was held in Budapest, Hungary. We received 56 submissions, and the workshop was attended by about 60 delegates. For ATAL-97, it was felt that the workshop was sufficiently mature that it merited its own event, and so the conference was located immediately before the AAAI-97 conference in Providence, Rhode Island. It was attended by about 75 delegates. ATAL-98 was co-located with the "Agents World" series of events, held in Paris in July 1998. 90 submissions were received, and 139 delegates registered for ATAL. In the five years since ATAL-94, the landscape of the computing world has changed almost beyond recognition. Even seasoned veterans of the historically fast-moving IT environment have been surprised by the current rate of change. Perhaps the simplest way we can sum up these changes is by noting that the first ATAL was also the last not to have a World Wide Web (WWW) page. In 1999, on the eve of the new millennium, it would be unthinkable for a serious academic conference or workshop not to have a dedicated WWW site. The changes brought about by the explosion of the Internet into worldwide public and corporate awareness are well documented, and it is not appropriate for us to add to the mountain of comment (and hyperbole). However, it is important to note that the rise of the Internet had a significant impact on the development of the agent field VI Preface itself. By the summer of 1994 it was becoming clear that the Internet would be a major proving ground for agent technology (perhaps even the "killer application"), although the full extent of this interest was not yet apparent. The emergence of agents on and for the Internet gave rise to a new, associated software technology, somewhat distinct from the "mainstream" of agent research and development. In the summer of 1994, a California-based company called General Magic was creating intense interest in the idea of mobile agents-programs that could transmit themselves across an electronic network and recommence execution at a remote site. At the time, General Magic were distributing a widely-read white paper that described "Telescript"-a programming language intended to realize the vision of mobile agents. In the event, it was not Telescript, but another programming language that caught the imagination of the Internet community: Java. When Netscape incorporated a Java virtual machine into their Navigator browser, and hence brought the idea of applets into the mainstream, they gave Java an enormous impetus, both as a way of animating the Internet, but also as a powerful, well-designed object-oriented programming language in its own right. A number of mobile agent frameworks were rapidly developed and released as Java packages, and interest in Telescript rapidly waned. As we write this preface in late 1998, Java is the programming language of choice not just for agent systems, but also, it seems, for most other applications in computing. Mobile agent technology was not the only other agent technology beginning to make its presence felt at the time of the first ATAL. The summer of 1994 saw the publication of a special issue of Communications of the ACM with the title "intelligent agents". Many of the articles in this special issue described a new type of agent system, that acted as a kind of "expert assistant" to a user working with a particular class of application. The vision of agents as intelligent assistants was perhaps articulated most clearly by Pattie Maes from MIT Media Lab, who described a number of prototype systems to realize the vision. Such user interface agents rapidly caught the imagination of a wider community, and in particular, the commercial possibilities of such technologies was self-evident. A number of agent startup companies were founded to commercialize this technology (many of which have by now either been sold or gone bust). Current interest in such agents comes, to a great extent, from the possibility of using them in electronic commerce scenarios, where they negotiate on behalf of their "owner". The commercial interest in agents in the latter half of the 1990s has not been limited to venture capitalists and "small scale" agent systems. Perhaps one of the most encouraging long-term trends for agent technology is the idea of agents as a software engineering paradigm. The level of interest in this concept has been evidenced in several ways. For example, the number of large-scale industrial-strength agent systems being developed and deployed is an obvious indicator. However, the degree of interest is perhaps best illustrated by the attempts currently underway to develop international standards for agent communication. Although some tentative steps towards standard agent communication languages were taken by the KQML/KIF community in the USA in the early 1990s, it is the FIPA initiative, started in 1995, which currently appears to be the best candidate for a standard agent communication framework. Turning more specifically to the ATAL workshops, a number of smaller scale trends have emerged, echoing to some extent the more visible changes in the computing world Preface VII itself. One obvious indicator that agent technology is beginning to mature is that far fewer new agent architectures are being developed. It seems that authors are taking architectures off the shelf, rather than developing their own. In this vein, the belief-desire-intention (BDI) class of architectures has become particularly prominent. This work represents a paradigm example of theATAL ethos-there is a well-defined theory, which relates more or less directly to specific architectures or programming languages. On the theoretical side, there has been an increasing trend towards more integrated models; that is, theories which cover a wider proportion of an agent's decision making and acting capabilities. We noted above that five years sometimes seems like a long time for an academic workshop. Incredibly, when ATAL began, there were no conferences dedicated to agent technology. In contrast, the agent research community is now served by at least two major international scientific conferences (the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents), as well as a dedicated journal (Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems). That agent technology is able to comfortably support this degree of interest tells us that agents have a good chance of succeeding as a technology. We hope that ATAL will continue to play its part in this development, maintaining its current high level of scientific and production values, and serving a vibrant, rich research and development community. To close, we would like to take this opportunity to thank those who have made ATAL the success we sincerely believe it is today. In particular, our thanks go to Jörg Müller, Munindar Singh, Anand Rao, and Milind Tambe, who have all acted as organizers for ATAL, and helped to shape it through their dedication and vision. In addition, we would like to thank those who have played various other special roles throughout the first five years, including

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...

For the last two decades, agent-based technology has been applied to building intelligent systems. The ability of agents to make their own decisions and adapt to and learn from their environment is a very powerful tool for implementing intelligent systems of general competence. In addition, the study of multi-agent systems—collections of specialised agents working in parallel—has helped us to solve complex problems not previously solved using a centralised approach.

Information

Agent-based computing remains an active field of research with the goal of building (semi-)autonomous software for dynamic ecosystems. Today, this task should be realized using dedicated, specialized frameworks. Over almost 40 years, multiple agent platforms have been developed. While many of them have been “abandoned”, others remain active, and new ones are constantly being released. This contribution presents a historical perspective on the domain and an up-to-date review of the existing agent platforms. It aims to serve as a reference point for anyone interested in developing agent systems. Therefore, the main characteristics of the included agent platforms are summarized, and selected links to projects where they have been used are provided. Furthermore, the described platforms are divided into general-purpose platforms and those targeting specific application domains. The focus of the contribution is on platforms that can be judged as being under active development. Information...

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.

Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent …, 2004

The European Commission's eEurope initiative aims to bring every citizen, home, school, business and administration online to create a digitally literate Europe. The value lies not in the objective itself, but in its ability to facilitate the advance of Europe into new ways of living and working. Just as in the first literacy revolution, our lives will change in ways never imagined. The vision of eEurope is underpinned by a technological infrastructure that is now taken for granted. Yet it provides us with the ability to pioneer radical new ways of doing business, of undertaking science, and, of managing our everyday activities. Key to this step change is the development of appropriate mechanisms to automate and improve existing tasks, to anticipate desired actions on our behalf (as human users) and to undertake them, while at the same time enabling us to stay involved and retain as much control as required. For many, these mechanisms are now being realised by agent technologies, which are already providing dramatic and sustained benefits in several business and industry domains, including B2B exchanges, supply chain management, car manufacturing, and so on. While there are many real successes of agent technologies to report, there is still much to be done in research and development for the full benefits to be achieved. This is especially true in the context of environments of pervasive computing devices that are envisaged in coming years. This paper describes the current state-of-the-art of agent technologies and identifies trends and challenges that will need to be addressed over the next 10 years to progress the field and realise the benefits. It offers a roadmap that is the result of discussions among participants from over 150 organisations including universities, research institutions, large multinational corporations and smaller IT start-up companies. The roadmap identifies successes and challenges, and points to future possibilities and demands; agent technologies are fundamental to the realisation of next generation computing.

2012

Over the past decade, there has been a strong revival of interest in agent-based technology, with a recognition that it impacts many areas such as artificial intelligence, distributed computing, and software engineering. Agent-based technology can be used to solve a variety of business and technology problems. Examples of such applications include electronic commerce, grid computing, social networks, and adaptive virtual environment. In an agent-based system, software agents with sufficient intelligence and autonomy are adopted to perform tasks such as sensing, planning, scheduling, reasoning and decision-making. An agent can either work independently or coordinate with other agents to accomplish tasks and missions. In the former case, an agent typically generates a set of goals based on its motivation, and also a list of plans for achieving its goals. In the later case, a collection of agents are structured as a multi-agent system (MAS), where a coordination model based on message passing among agents is defined to provide a uniform interface for their interactions. In this book, we provide a collection of practical applications of agentbased technology. Chapter 1 demonstrates how agent-based technology can be applied to smart distribution grid operation. It presents an agent-based architecture which can be developed to support the smooth modernization of the power distribution grids. Chapter 2 discusses how to resolve conflicts in resource federation with agent negotiation. A scenario of resource federation in grid computing is illustrated to show the adoption of creative negotiation for conflict resolution. Chapter 3 and 4 provide two application examples of agent-based technology in electronic commerce, where homogeneous and heterogeneous agents are defined and adopted for electronic auctions (Chapter 3), and a multi-issue e-negotiation system is developed for electronic commerce (Chapter 4). Chapter 5 presents an innovative application of intelligent agents in adaptive virtual environments. By using intelligent agents, a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment can be tuned into an adaptive system, which improves the quality of human-computer interface. Chapter 6 provides another example of using intelligent agent to find the shortest path between two points in a changing drawing environment. Although we present quite a few practical application examples of using agent-based technology in this book, the collection of such application areas is far from completion. The purpose of this book is to provide examples of recent advances in agent-based XII Preface systems and demonstrate how agent-based technology can be used to solve practical problems. It is our hope that this book will not only help the researchers and practitioners to understand the practical usage of agent-based technology, but also provides them hints of using agent-based technology in innovative ways. This book has been a collaborative effort, which wouldn't be possible for us to complete it without the substantial contribution and generous assistance we received from many people. We are most grateful, of course, to the authors of the chapters for the quality of their research. We are also especially grateful for the generous support from the InTech Open Access Publisher. At InTech, we thank all those who assisted in this book, especially Ivona Lovric for her much hard work on communicating with the authors and helping put all chapters together.

2003

2004

While there are many real successes of agent technologies, there is still much to be done in research and development for the full benefits to be achieved. This is especially true in the context of environments of pervasive computing devices that are envisaged in coming years. This paper summarises the current stateof-the-art of agent technologies and identifies trends and challenges that will need to be addressed over the next 10 years to progress the field and realise the benefits.

IEEE Expert, 1996