Software Agent

What is an Agent?
An agent is any entity whose state is viewed as consisting of mental components (e.g., beliefs, capabilities, choices, and commitments).
An agent is an entity that: Acts on behalf of others in an autonomous fashion. performs its actions in some level of proactivity and reactivity Exhibits some levels of the key attributes of learning, co-operation, and mobility.

Classification of Software Agents

Autonomy refers to the characteristic that an agent can operate on its own without the need for human guidance. In other words, an agent has a set of internal states and goals; it acts in such a manner to meet its goals on behalf of the user. In order to do so, an agent has to be proactive in the sense that it has the ability to take the initiative rather than acting simply in response to its environment. Cooperation with other agents is necessary to accomplish a complicated task. In order to cooperate however, an agent must possess a social ability that allows it to interact with other agents. Finally, an agent is intelligent if it is able to learn and sense as it acts and reacts to its external environment.

Interface Agents

Interface agents perform tasks for their owners by emphasizing autonomy and learning. They support and provide assistance to a user learning to use a particular application such as a spread sheet. The agent here observes the actions being carried out by the user and tries to learn new short cuts, then it will try to suggest better ways of doing the same task. Interface agents learn to better assist its users in four ways : By observing and imitating the user Through receiving positive and negative feedback from the user By receiving explicit instructions from the user By asking other agents for advice

Collaborative Agents

The goal of collaborative agents is to interconnect separately developed collaborative agents, thus enabling the ensemble to function beyond the capabilities of any of its members. Implementing efficient ways of cooperation among agents is actually one of the central issues for Multi-Agent Systems development. One of the motivations for having collaborative agents is to provide solutions to inherently distributed problems, such as distributed sensor network, or air traffic control.

Information Agents

The information agents (also known as Internet agents) will be able to help us manage, manipulate, or collate information from many distributed resources. It is a bit similar to

interface agents. One distinction between interface and information agents, however, is that information agents are defined by what they do, in contrast to interface agents which are defined by what they are. Information agents are most useful on the Web where they can help us with mundane tasks.

Reactive Agents

Reactive Agents act and respond in a stimulus-response manner to the present state of the environment in which they are embedded. The following are the key ideas: Emergent functionality: the dynamics of the interaction leads to the emergent complexity. Task decomposition: a reactive agent is viewed as a collection of modules which operate autonomously and responsible for specific tasks (e.g. sensing, computation, etc.). They tend to operate on representations that are close to raw sensor data.

Hybrid Agents

Hybrid Agents refer to those agents whose constitution is a combination of two or more agent philosophies within a singular agent. These philosophies may be mobile, interface, information, collaborative etc. The goal of having hybrid agents is the notion that the benefits accured from having the combination of philosophies within a single agent is greater than the gains obtained from the same agent based on a singular philosophy.

Mobile Agents

A software agent is a mobile software agent if it is able to migrate from host to host to work in a heterogeneous network environment. This means we must also consider the software environment in which mobile agents exist. This is called the mobile agent environment, which is a software system distributed over a network of heterogeneous computers and its primary task is to provide an environment in which mobile agents can run. Note that not only an agent transports itself, but also its state. When it reaches the new host, the agent should be able to perform appropriately in the new environment.

Agent-oriented programming

(AOP) is a term that has proposed for the set of activities necessary to create software agents. What he means by agent is an entity whose state is viewed as consisting of mental components such as beliefs, capabilities, choices, and commitments. Agent-oriented programming can be thought of as a specialization of object-oriented programming approach, with constraints on what kinds of state-defining parameters, message types, and methods are appropriate. From this perspective, an agent is essentially an object with an attitude. An agents mental state consists of components such as beliefs, decisions, capabilities, and obligations. Agent programs control the behaviour and mental state of agents. These programs are executed by an agent interpreter. An agent interpreter assures that each agent will iterate through two steps at regular intervals: 1) read the current messages and update its mental state (including beliefs and commitments), and 2) execute the commitments for the current time, possibly resulting in further belief change. The original agent interpreter, AGENT-0, implements five language elements: fact statements, communicative action statements, conditional action statements, variables, and commitment rules.

AOP versus OOP

Use mental constructs to design the computational system. Mental categories appear in the programming language. Programming language semantics relates to the semantics of mental constructs. The agent-oriented programming (AOP) framework specializes the object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm. AOP fixes the (mental) state of the modules (agents) to consist of components such as beliefs, capabilities, and decisions. A computation consists of these agents informing, requesting, offering, accepting, rejecting, competing, and assisting one another.

AOP Framework A complete AOP system includes three primary components: 1. a restricted formal language (including several modalities such as belief and commitment) with clear syntax and semantics for describing mental states; 2. . an interpreted programming language in which to define and program agents, with primitive commands (e.g., REQUEST, INFORM); 3. an agentifier, converting neutral devices into programmable agents.

Components of Mental State

The actions of an agent are determined by its decisions, or choices. Decisions are constrained (but nor determined) by the agents beliefs, which refer to states of the world, mental states of other agents, and capabilities of this and other agents.