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Intelligent Agents: Theory
We begin our article with descriptions of three events that occur
sometime in the future:
- The key air-traffic control systems in
the country of Ruritania suddenly fail, due to freak weather
conditions. Fortunately, computerised air-traffic control systems in
neighbouring countries negotiate between themselves to track
and deal with all affected flights, and the potentially
disastrous situation passes without major incident.
- Upon logging in to your computer,
you are presented with a list of email messages, sorted into
order of importance by your personal digital assistant
(PDA). You are then presented with a similar list of news
articles; the assistant draws your attention to one particular
article, which describes hitherto unknown work that is very close to
your own. After an electronic discussion with a number of other
PDAs, your PDA has already obtained a relevant technical report for
you from an FTP site, in the anticipation that it will be
of interest.
- You are editing a file, when your PDA requests your attention:
an email message has arrived, that contains notification about
a paper you sent to an important conference, and the PDA
correctly predicted that you would want to see it as soon as
possible. The paper has been accepted, and without prompting,
the PDA begins to look into travel arrangements, by consulting
a number of databases and other networked information sources.
A short time later, you are presented with a summary of the
cheapest and most convenient travel options.
We shall not claim that computer systems of the sophistication
indicated in these scenarios are just around the corner, but serious
academic research is underway into similar applications:
air-traffic control has long been a research domain in distributed
artificial intelligence (DAI) [Steeb et al., 1988]; various types of
information manager, that filter and obtain information on behalf of
their users, have been prototyped [Maes, 1994a]; and systems such as
those that appear in the third scenario are discussed
in [Levy et al., 1994][McGregor, 1992]. The key computer-based components
that appear in each of the above scenarios are known as agents.
It is interesting to note that one way of defining AI is by saying
that it is the subfield of computer science which aims to construct
agents that exhibit aspects of intelligent behaviour. The notion of an
`agent' is thus central to AI. It is perhaps surprising, therefore,
that until the mid to late 1980s, researchers from mainstream AI gave
relatively little consideration to the issues surrounding agent
synthesis. Since then, however, there has been an intense flowering of
interest in the subject: agents are now widely discussed by
researchers in mainstream computer science, as well as those working
in data communications and concurrent systems research, robotics, and
user interface design. A British national daily paper recently
predicted that:
`Agent-based computing (ABC) is likely to be the next
significant breakthrough in software development.'
[Sargent, 1992]
Moreover, the UK-based consultancy firm Ovum has predicted that the
agent technology industry would be worth some US$3.5 billion
worldwide by the year 2000 [Houlder, 1994]. Researchers from both
industry and academia are thus taking agent technology seriously: our
aim in this paper is to survey what we perceive to be the most
important issues in the design and construction of intelligent agents,
of the type that might ultimately appear in applications such as those
suggested by the fictional scenarios above. We begin our article, in
the following sub-section, with a discussion on the question of
exactly what an agent is.
Next: What is an
Up:
Intelligent Agents: Theory
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Intelligent Agents: Theory