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Now that we have at least a preliminary understanding of what an agent
is, we can embark on a more detailed look at their properties, and how
we might go about constructing them. For convenience, we identify
three key issues, and structure our survey around these
(cf. [Seel, 1989]):
- Agent theories
are essentially specifications.
Agent theorists address such questions as:
How are we to conceptualise agents?
What properties should agents have, and how are we to
formally represent and reason about these properties?
- Agent architectures
represent the move from specification to implementation.
Those working in the area of agent architectures
address such questions as: How are we to construct computer
systems that satisfy the properties specified by agent
theorists? What software and/or hardware structures are
appropriate? What is an appropriate separation of concerns?
- Agent languages
are programming languages that may embody the various principles
proposed by theorists. Those working in the area of agent
languages address such questions as: How are we to program
agents? What are the right primitives for this task? How are we to
effectively compile or execute agent programs?
As we pointed out above, the distinctions between these three areas
are occasionally somewhat dubious. The issue of agent theories is
discussed in the section 2. In
section 3, we discuss architectures, and in
section 4, we discuss agent languages. A brief
discussion of applications appears in section 5,
and some concluding remarks appear in section 6.
Finally, a note on the scope of the article. It is important to
realise that we are writing very much from the point of view of AI,
and the material we have chosen to review clearly reflects this. Also,
the article is not a review of Distributed AI, although the
material we discuss arguably falls under this banner. We have
deliberately avoided discussing topics that are the domain of
classical DAI (such as cooperation protocols, cooperative problem
solving, and so on); for reviews of this area,
see [Bond and Gasser, 1988] and [Chaib-draa et al., 1992].
Next: Agent Theories
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Previous: Other Attributes of