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Intelligent Agents: Software Technology for the new Millennium
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Faltings, Boi |
| Copyright Year | 2000 |
| Abstract | Why agents? Computing has evolved from the age of calculating machines (1950–60) through information processing (1970–80) to information environments (1990–2000). Information environments, such as the world wide web, provide the basis for autonomous software systems. Examples of such systems are systems for mail and news delivery, document indexing (web crawlers), and consistency maintenance. Autonomous systems have also appeared in robotics, in particular for mobile robots. At the same time, software is becoming complex to the point of being unmanageable. For example, the Microsoft Windows 2000 system contains 35 million lines of code with many bugs. Its release date has been pushed back several times and it is not clear whether it will ever become sufficiently reliable for commercial success. To avoid the difficulties of maintaining consistency in such large software projects, the tendency is to decompose systems into small components which can be understood independently of each other. However, component paradigms are still lacking intuitive metaphors which make component behaviour easy to understand. Both developments – autonomous software and robotic agents as well as software components – are now converging into a single technology: agents . Agents turn software components into proactive processes that are: • autonomous in that they react themselves to observations of their environment without requiring explicit commands, • proactive in that they recognize and react to changes in the environment which present opportunities, • embedded in that their actions respect the real-time constraints imposed by the environment, • heterogeneous in that many different kinds of agents can work together in the same system, and be added or removed without interrupting it. According to the agent vision, complex homogeneous software systems will be replaced by networks of communicating agents. Agents can be written independently as long as they conform to a standard communication language, and they can be integrated or modified even in a running system. Infrastructures for agent-based computing are being developed with very heavy investment from large companies such as SUN and IBM and are beginning to appear on the market (for example, JINI from SUN). |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www-lsi.upc.es/~ia/agentes/a001Faltings.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.lsi.upc.edu/~ia/agentes/a001Faltings.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~sklar/teaching/s08/cis20.2/papers/a001Faltings.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
