- Hyacinth S. Nwana & Divine T. Ndumu (1999), "A Perspective on Software Agents
Research", The Knowledge Engineering Review, Vol 14, No 2, pp
1-18. PDF
This paper sets out, ambitiously, to present a brief reappraisal of
software agents research. Evidently, software agent technology has
promised much. However some five years after the word "agent" came
into vogue in the popular computing press, it is perhaps time the
efforts in this fledgling area are thoroughly evaluated with a view to
refocusing future efforts. We do not pretend to have done this in this
paper -- but we hope we have sown the first seeds towards a thorough
first 5-year report of the software agents area. The paper contains
some strong views not necessarily widely accepted by the agent
community.
- Mike Wooldridge and Nick Jennings,
"The
Pittfalls of Agent-Oriented Development", proceedings of the
Second Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents'98), May 1998.
"This paper identifies the main pitfalls that await the agent system
developer, and, where possible, makes tentative recommendations on how
to avoid them."
- Nicholas R. Jennings and Michael J. Wooldridge,
Applications Of Intelligent Agents, in Nicholas R. Jennings and
Michael J. Wooldridge (Ed.), Agent
Technology Foundations, Applications, and Markets ,
Springer-Verlag, 1998.
From the back cover... "Agent Technology:
Foundations, Applications, and Markets presents a coherent
introduction to the basic technical issues, discusses future
challenges, and reports on successes in designing and building agent
applications. The chapters are written by internationally leading
authorities in the field and give a unique account of potential and
actual applications in such areas as telecommunications systems,
personal digital assistants, information management, information
economics, business applications, air traffic control, computer
simulation, transportation management, and financial management. The
book is written for a general audience in the information technology
field. It can be expected to convince software engineers and IT
managers that "Agents are the next major computing paradigm and will
be pervasive in every market by the year 2000." (Janca, 1995)"
- Software
Agents, Edited by Jeffrey Bradshaw, Published by the AAAI
Press/The MIT Press, 500 pp., $40.00 paper, 1997, ISBN 0-262-52234-9.
"The book contains the most comprehensive and accessible collection of
papers to date addressing these issues, authored by the leading
researchers and developers of agent-based systems. Chapters by
researchers from major universities (MIT, Stanford, University of
Maryland, USC, University of Toronto), computing companies (Apple,
Microsoft, and General Magic), and industrial research centers (AT&T
Bell Labs, Boeing, EURISCO, Interval) not only summarize the
state-of-the-art, but point the way in which standards and products
incorporating agent technology are likely to evolve over the next few
years. The wide variety of issues and approaches addressed make it an
ideal resource for classroom use, as well as a reference for computing
professionals. Because the book describes basic concepts and
implementations without resorting to mathematical or overly technical
terms, it will also be suitable for many non-computing professionals
who are interested in a survey of this rapidly growing field."
- Introduction
to Software Agents, Jeffrey Bradshaw, in "Software Agents" ,AAAI
Press/The MIT Press, 1997.
- Hyacinth S. Nwana (1996),
href="http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/introduction/ao/">Software Agents:
An Overview, The Knowledge Engineering Review Vol 11 (3). (postscript
2.6M). Agent software is a rapidly developing area of
research. However, the 'overuse' of the word agent has tended to mask
the fact that, in reality, there is a truly heterogeneous body of
research being carried out under this banner. This overview paper
presents a typology of agents. It places them in context, defines them
and then goes on, inter alia, to overview critically the rationales,
hypotheses, goals, challenges and state-of-the-art demonstrators of
the various agent types in the typology. Hence, it attempts to make
explicit much of what is usually implicit in the agents literature. It
also proceeds to overview some other general issues which pertain to
all the types of agents in the typology. This paper largely reviews
software agents, and it also contains some strong opinions that are
not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community. [42 pages]
10/1/96
- Peter Stone and Manuela Veloso,
"Multiagent Systems: A Survey from a Machine Learning
Perspective", submitted IEEE-TKDE 1996
- M. J. Wooldridge and N. R. Jennings, (1995),
Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice, The Knowledge Engineering
Review 10 (2) 115-152. ( postscript (273K), compresses postscript (114K))
- Tim Finin, Yannis Labrou, and James Mayfield, KQML as an
agent communication language, in Jeff Bradshaw (Ed.), ``Software
Agents'', MIT Press, Cambridge (to appear 1997).
- Software
agents by Genesereth and Ketchpel
- A. S. Rao and M. P. Georgeff, "Bdi agents:
From theory to practice," Tech. Rep. 56, Australian Artificial
Intelligence Institute, Melbourne, Australia, Apr 1995. The study of
computational agents capable of rational behaviour has received a
great deal of attention in recent years. Theoretical formalizations
of such agents and their implementations have proceeded in parallel
with little or no connection between them. This paper explores a
particular type of rational agent, a Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI)
agent. The primary aim of this paper is to integrate (a) the
theoretical foundations of BDI agents from both a quantitative
decision-theoretic perspective and a symbolic reasoning perspective;
(b) the implementations of BDI agents from an ideal theoretical
perspective and a more practical perspective; and (c) the building of
large-scale applications based on BDI agents. In particular, an
air-traffic management application will be described from both a
theoretical and an implementation perspective.
-
Foundations
of Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Greg O'Hare and Nick
Jennings (Ed.), Sixth-Generation Computer Technology Series, John
Wiley & Sons. The book includes 21 papers dived into four sections --
formulative readings; cooperation, coordination and agency; DAI
frameworks and their applications; related disciplines, and includes
an appendix on DAI references and resources.
8/10/96
- Agent-Based
Engineering, the Web, and Intelligence,Charles J. Petrie Stanford
Center for Design Research, 1996. Abstract: We describe the use of
KQML-like Agents and their compatibility with the World-Wide Web. One
distinguishing characteristic of such agents is the necessity for a
peer-to-peer protocol vs. the client-server protocol of HTTP. This is
indicative of a major conflict between the web and agent paradigms
that must be resolved for integration of the two technologies, both of
which are useful for design and engineering applications. We also note
that "intelligence" is not a necessary property of useful agents and
is not helpful in distinguishing agents from other kinds of software.
agent introduction web 5/31/96
- Lenny
Foner <foner@media.mit.edu> asks and answers the question What's
an Agent, Anyway?. Foner uses Julia,
a MUD
robot, as an example to define a good software agent and discusses the
sociology behind user acceptance of agents. It is also available in
Postscript.
Mobile
Agents White Paper, Jim White, General Magic, 1996.
Mobile Agents:
Are they a good idea?, Colin Harrison, David Chess and Aaron
Kershenbaum. Research report, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, March
1995.
- B. Chaib-draa, B. Moulin, R. Mandiau, and P. Millot, "Trends
in DAI", Kluwer Academic's AI Review-6(1)1992.
- Ed Durfee, Victor Lesser, Dan Corkill, "Cooperative
Distributed Problem Solving", The Handbook of AI, volume 4, 1989.
- Keith Decker, "Distributed Problem Solving Techniques: A
Survey", IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-17(5) 1987.